Baroness O'Cathain: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for mentioning the tourism deficit because, according to the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, this Government have done great things in co-ordinating tourism effort and getting more people to visit this country. The fact is that our tourism earnings are in deficit and there is no co-ordination overseas among the various bodies that are trying to promote Britain. VisitBritain is one such body, but how many British organisations are now promoting tourists to come to Britain in the United States? It is not just one.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford: My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply, but it would be more satisfactory if there were a statutory responsibility. You could rely on the informal links through having a councillor sitting on the governing body of the academy or city technology college, but you would be relying on informal links. One would hope that, in these circumstances, the school improvement partner would see the local authority as one of the partnership groups to which it would naturally send the report.
	This is an extremely modest amendment, merely asking that local authorities should have a chance to see these reports. I cannot see why the Minister is not prepared to concede the point. However, we will think about it and conceivably bring it back at Third Reading. I am not totally happy with the Minister's answer—it is not satisfactory— but I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, this group of government amendments relates to minor school organisation matters and parent councils. I have written to noble Lords setting out their effect in detail.
	To summarise, Amendment No. 17 is a technical adjustment to the provisions in Schedule 2, to make clear that among the provisions of the Bill that may be modified by regulations providing for the promoter to be relieved of the duty to implement approved proposals are the provisions dealing with closing schools as well as those relating to opening them.
	Amendments Nos. 18 and 19 remove the exemption for land which is defined as publicly funded under the provisions of Schedule 4. They avoid double jeopardy on this claim for proceeds of disposal by ensuring that these provisions have force only after the disposal provisions of Schedule 22 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, as amended by this Bill, have been applied.
	Amendment No. 25 corrects an omission from the wording of the Bill. It provides that regulations made under Clause 24, affecting alterations to schools, may make provision corresponding to that made in regulations under paragraphs 21 to 31 of Schedule 2, as well as that made in Schedule 2 itself.
	Amendment No. 34 is similarly technical. The Secretary of State has a power to modify trust deeds relating to foundation, voluntary and foundation special schools in connection with the operation of the provisions of the 1998, 2000 and 2002 Education Acts. This amendment gives the Secretary of State the same power in relation to the provisions of this Bill. Amendments Nos. 20, 35, 36 and 37 update the reference to "promoters" in the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, to take account of the fact that provisions of that Act continue in Wales, but are replaced by the provisions of this Bill in England.
	On Amendments Nos. 41 to 44, in Committee, the right reverend Prelates the Bishop of Peterborough and the Bishop of Southwell reminded us that there are situations where parents might find it helpful to invite people other than parents of current pupils on to the parent council. These amendments allow that to happen. However, we want parents to take ownership of the parent council, so parent members must consent to the appointment of a non-parent member, and member and parent members of registered pupils must always be the majority on the parent council. Many schools already have successful parent councils with some non-parent members. We do not want to upset arrangements that are already working well or prevent people making a valuable contribution to their local school because they do not currently have a child at that school, hence these amendments. I beg to move.

Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, in moving Amendment No. 21, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 39 and 40. Amendment No. 21 prevents a foundation reducing the current statutory level of elected parent governors on the board of a school when it becomes a foundation. Power in a school resides in the governing body, not in the parent councils that the Government are introducing. The governors have legal powers, which is why we think it is important—to the Government's agenda, as well as ours—to involve parents in the education of their children in a meaningful way and not to reduce the number of parents freely and democratically elected by other parents to take part in decision-making about the running of the school.
	The House will realise that this amendment is a repeat of an amendment we tabled in Committee, and we have returned it because we are not satisfied with the Government's reasons for rejecting it. In Committee, the Minister said:
	"The model of governance that we propose for parents is precisely that which currently applies in many thousands of voluntary-aided schools, which are perfectly adequately managed within the state system".—[Official Report, 18/7/06; col. 1231.]
	He went on to say how popular such schools are. I have no doubt of that, but we are dealing with a step-change in the number of schools that he proposes should be governed in this way. There are currently only 4,288 voluntary-aided primary and secondary schools in England and Wales, and the Government are hoping that many thousands of the remaining maintained schools will enthusiastically take up their invitation to become foundation schools. Currently, one can expect a certain amount of homogeneity and consensus of opinion in the parent body of a voluntary-aided school because the members usually share a faith or an ethos of some sort and there may not be a diversity of approach about how the school is run. We cannot say that that will necessarily be the case with the new foundation schools. What currently works for a few thousand faith schools may not work for thousands of schools that change their status under this legislation.
	The Minister went on to say that he expects that in many trust schools a minority of the governors will be appointed by the trust. That may well be so, but we cannot rely on that. We need to set a minimum representation of freely elected parents below which a foundation cannot go if we are to be sure that the board of governors will not be stuffed with the trust's placemen and placewomen. What we are asking for is not extreme; it is quite modest and is that the current level of representation is at least maintained. I cannot see the Minister's problem with that.
	I turn now to Amendments Nos. 39 and 40. When my noble friend Lady Sharp introduced these amendments in Committee about our concept of schools working together in a community trust she received a fairly encouraging response from the Minister. He said:
	"If she means trusts that have local authority engagement within the provisions of the Bill as it stands, they absolutely can. We will give strong encouragement to local authorities to be engaged in trusts alongside other local community groups and organisations which can make a substantial contribution to improving schools".—[Official Report, 18/7/06; col. 1133.]
	However, later he said:
	"The 20 per cent level for local authority engagement in trusts, as set out in the Bill, gives local authorities the flexibility to play a valuable role in brokering those relationships and supporting the formation of trusts in their communities. The 20 per cent figure is also consistent with provisions in local government legislation about local authority involvement in companies and trusts more widely.
	However, we do not believe that it is right to increase that proportion beyond 20 per cent, which will get close to making local authorities the dominant force in a trust. If a local authority wishes to have that level of control over a trust, it anyway has the option of promoting a community school and exercising this control directly".—[Official Report, 18/7/06; col. 1134.]
	That reply very effectively revealed the Government's attitude to local authorities.
	Perhaps I may take in order the points made by the Minister. First, he talked about 20 per cent being the normal level of involvement of local authorities in companies and trusts more widely. We are not taking about an ordinary company, such as might be set up to enhance local job opportunities or economic development, but of a school into whose hands we put the future of our children. These need to be accountable to the whole community. They do that through the local authority and through the ballot box.
	Secondly, the Minister does not want a local authority to be the dominant force in a trust. Why not? It represents the local people—current and future parents of the school. Have not many local authorities demonstrated their very high level of expertise in running successful schools over the years? Are we to throw away all this expertise? I can understand that poor performing local authorities are not desirable partners, but to leave the provision only to the top performing ones is going too far.
	Thirdly, the Minister talks about the opportunities for local authorities to promote community schools. He knows that the Government have stacked the odds against the ability of local authorities to open new community schools. They have to jump through all sorts of hoops that others do not have to negotiate, such as achieving top rating on an inspection. Indeed, the ability of the best local authorities to open new schools at all was introduced into the Bill in another place in response to Labour rebels and their serious concerns about trust schools.
	The Government have once again demonstrated their control-freakery. They do not trust the ballot box and they do not trust local authorities, even their own, to run schools any more. They may have some justification regarding some of the worst authorities, but in tackling that problem they are throwing out the baby with the bath water. They are removing the influence of vast numbers of perfectly competent authorities, which in turn are answerable to the electorate at the ballot box for what they do in schools and elsewhere. We are trying to address that matter, as well as the very serious issue well laid out by my noble friend in Committee, and which I will not repeat, that we wish to see more co-operation rather than competition between schools. That is what our concept of community foundation would achieve, and I recommend our amendments to the House. I beg to move.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, in moving this amendment, I wish to speak also to government Amendments Nos. 27 to 30. Government Amendments Nos. 26 to 30 relate to the removal of foundations. Clauses 25 to 27 provide for the governing bodies of certain foundation schools with foundations—trust schools—to publish proposals to remove the school's foundation. Otherwise it would be possible to terminate the relationship between a school and its foundation only by closing the school.
	Amendments Nos. 26 and 27 correct deficiencies in the existing wording of the Bill. They clarify the circumstances in which a minority of the governors of a school may trigger the publication of proposals to remove the school's foundation. Amendments Nos. 28, 29 and 30 deal with arrangements for agreeing the transfer of land where a foundation is removed, and any associated compensation. This may be compensation in relation to capital expenditure incurred on school land or in relation to the value of the land itself. The effect of these amendments is to ensure that governing bodies have a full picture of the implications of removing a foundation when they are considering their proposals. They will eliminate the risk that a governing body may publish proposals that cannot subsequently be implemented.
	Amendment No. 31 is intended to deal with those exceptional cases where a trust school is established on land provided by a foundation from private sources, and the foundation is removed. Such cases will be extremely rare. We are concerned here only with schools established after the Bill is enacted on land provided from private sources, either as trust schools or as voluntary schools which subsequently change category to become trust schools.
	Where a foundation is removed, we would expect land held by the foundation to transfer to the school's governing body. In these circumstances, compensation may be payable to the trustees of the foundation. If the objects of the foundation extend beyond the purposes of the school from which the foundation is removed, the trustees may use any money that they hold for those other purposes. If they do not, and the trustees do not wish to use any money that they hold for the purposes of the school, they may apply to the Charity Commission to make a cy-pres scheme to vary the foundation's charitable objects.
	Amendment No. 31 in this group, in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth, would oblige the Charity Commission, when considering such an application, to treat the school from which the foundation had been removed as if it had been discontinued. It would prevent any money held by the trustees being used for the purposes of that school. The amendment also seeks to amend Section 554 of the 1996 Act, which gives the Secretary of State the power to make orders about the use of Church of England endowments.
	We entirely recognise the right reverend Prelate's desire to ensure that endowments provided for the purpose of Church of England education should continue to be used for that purpose. But having given a good deal of consideration to the matter, the department cannot accept his amendment for the following reasons.
	First, it will be open to the trustees of any foundation to apply to the Charity Commission through the normal route where they wish to vary the foundation's objects. The Charity Commission would consider each application on its individual merits, taking account of the purposes for which the foundation was originally set up and the change in circumstances which led to the application. We do not believe that it is right to seek to fetter the Charity Commission's discretion in considering such applications.
	Secondly, there may be circumstances in which money held by a foundation might legitimately be used for the purposes of the school which removed the foundation. This might be the case where, for example, the land previously held by the foundation was originally provided for the purposes of education in a particular locality, or a school with a particular religious character. I should stress that a school may not lose its religious character simply by removing its foundation. So a Church of England school which removed its foundation would continue to be a Church of England school in the eyes of the law, and would still be subject to diocesan oversight by virtue of the Diocesan Boards of Education Measure 1991.
	I should also explain that it would be open to the trustees of a foundation to take steps to protect the foundation's position before the foundation became subject to removal. Where the governing body of voluntary school established after the Bill came into force wished to change category to foundation, which would make the school's foundation subject to removal, the governing body could publish proposals for such a change only with the trustees' consent. The trustees could either withhold their consent, or seek to vary the foundation's objects so that if it were subsequently removed, any money held by the foundation could be used for other purposes. Similarly, where it was proposed to establish a new trust school on the site of a former voluntary school, the trustees could also seek to vary the objects of the foundation before the school was established.
	Government Amendments Nos. 45, 46 and 48 make explicit that the schools adjudicator has the powers to determine the public share of disposal proceeds where a school proposes to sell non-playing field land and the matter is referred to the adjudicator.
	Clause 36 introduces Schedule 4, which amends Schedule 22 to the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, which protects public investment in non-playing field school land. The provisions of this Bill include that where a maintained school wishes to dispose of publicly funded non-playing field land it must inform its local authority, which can claim a share of the proceeds which are attributable to public investment. Where there is not local agreement, the matter can be referred to the schools adjudicator for determination.
	However, we have not yet directly in the Bill given the adjudicator the power to determine what share of the disposal proceeds is attributable to public investment, and although it is implicit in the other powers he is given, we consider it safer to give him an explicit power in the Bill, which these amendments do.
	Amendments Nos. 47, 49 and 50 correct errors of drafting, by inserting a missing word, and by correcting two cross-references.
	I am glad to tell the right reverend Prelate that the Government propose to accept Amendments Nos. 51, 52 and 53. While we think that it is unlikely that any future Secretary of State would act to thwart the reasonable wishes of the trustees of a discontinued school to dispose of trustee land where it can no longer serve an educational purpose, we are aware that the major voluntary bodies are not so sanguine. To give them confidence that this Government do not aim to blight trustees' use of their own property, we are content to accept these amendments. I beg to move.

Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, Amendments Nos. 32 and 33 go hand in hand. Amendment No. 32 calls for a total review of special educational needs provision, a full inquiry into the reasons why special schools have closed, a consideration of the views of parents of children with special educational needs and a thorough examination of all the categories of special educational needs. The amendment would also ensure that a review was completed within six months of the Bill being enacted. Amendment No. 33 places a moratorium on the closure of special needs schools until the review as designed in Amendment No. 32 has been carried out.
	The Minister's words in Committee made for interesting re-reading. He stated:
	"In fact, the proportion of pupils with statements in special schools has risen over the past five years".
	He went on to say that that rise in proportion,
	"demonstrates that there is no national policy of seeking to close special schools".—[Official Report, 5/7/06; col. 332.]
	Yet, there is a missing link in that statement. I am afraid that the rise in statements for pupils with special educational needs does not in itself amount to national policy. As far as I am aware, the statementing process is not controlled from the Department for Education and Skills, so I do not see the link. If the Minister meant to commit to a national policy that will champion the continued existence of special schools and halt their closure until a full review has been undertaken, I would welcome that commitment wholeheartedly.
	I make it absolutely clear that I recognise and applaud the achievements of all schools that provide an education for children with special needs in both mainstream and special schools. In providing for children with special needs they perform an increasingly demanding task, yet the system suffers from inbuilt flaws. First, there is the existing bias in legislation, which has led local authorities across the country to believe that they are required to opt for mainstream. Secondly, there is the statementing system, where it becomes increasingly clear that the funds do not follow the child. The Minister has admitted in his evidence to the Select Committee:
	"As minister for special educational needs ... I would be the last person to claim that all is well in the system. Almost every day I deal with correspondence from members of the House about difficult individual cases, including complaints about both the quality of provision and the action of local authorities in assessing the needs of individual children".
	Three major reports on SEN have been published in the past six months. There are 1,300,000 pupils in this country without statements who have special educational needs, according to the DfES statistics. They rely on our complicated system of statementing and inconsistent provision of special needs education. The SEN debate is gathering significant momentum. There is a real sense that some functions of the system are unacceptable, and real confusion among parents about how best to navigate that system. The representations to the Education and Skills Select Committee report were widely drawn and varied. The conclusions drawn by the University of Cambridge report, The Costs of Inclusion, were just as varied and searching. Yet I found myself disappointed by the Government's response to both those reports.
	While both the Select Committee and the University of Cambridge reports advised for the adoption of a national framework with local flexibility, the Government have declined even to investigate the option and declined to gather the empirical evidence that would provide a clear sense of the effectiveness of the statementing system and the effectiveness of SEN provision in the mainstream. As the Minister stated in Committee, the number of children with statements increases year on year. SEN is a part of our education system that is here to stay. Yet the Government's policy pledge of 2004, Removing Barriers to Achievement, tells us that,
	"the proportion of children in special schools should fall over time".
	Indeed, the Minister sought to reassure us on these Benches in Committee that the population of children in special schools is broadly static over recent years. But a glance at the figures tells us that since the 2004 policy paper, Removing Barriers to Achievement, that population has dropped by 2,400, the lowest it has been since 1997.
	What is more, government guidance of 2001 Inclusive Schooling, states:
	"The starting point is always that children who have statements will receive mainstream education".
	If that does not constitute an assumption in favour of inclusion, I do not know what does. Yet the Minister has insisted on many occasions that Her Majesty's Government do not have such a policy. Action speaks louder than words.
	The heart of the matter is that many pupils rely on special school education. There are also many who are served well in the mainstream. A bias against special schools is not only unfounded but unfair to those children who could benefit so much from the wholesale provision that those schools can offer. It is hard to ignore the evidence to the Select Committee which, in the report summary, stated that,
	"an indiscriminate approach in implementing a policy of inclusion ... fails those vulnerable children who need support the most".
	It is hard to ignore the evidence of schools in the The Costs of Inclusion report, where a year 1 teacher describes the anti-incentive of the statementing process where,
	"we can't really hit the high spots, achievement-wise for that child because then if we did that they wouldn't get the financial support".
	Special schools are valuable and they are in demand. Amendment No. 33 would protect existing special schools until a fair and balanced SEN strategy has been prepared for the future. There is strong evidence to show that children with statements want to be taught in special schools. In 2003, more than 5,000 children with statements transferred from mainstream schools to special schools, and only 1,200 went in the other direction. The Disability Rights Commission stated last year that,
	"many parents of disabled children have little confidence that mainstream schools will provide a safe environment where their children can reach their full potential".
	Let me make it perfectly clear that I do not propose today to increase the number of special schools, nor do I propose to decrease the number of children with SEN in mainstream schools. What I do want to make clear is that the evidence shows us that special schools are successful and should be regarded as centres of excellence that pave the way in achieving in some of the most challenging areas of education. Yet 120 maintained SEN schools have closed since this Government came to power in 1997. Since the introduction of the Government's paper in 2004, Removing Barriers to Achievement, no fewer than 45 special schools have been closed. The number is far less in the private sector; clearly the demand for special school places remains. It seems that the private sector is, in so far as it can, redressing the balance of children who wish to be educated in special schools. I was shocked to discover that in the past four years the number of children with statements who are educated in special schools has dropped by 3,230, while 450 more children with statements are being taught in pupil referral units than in 2002.
	It is clear that the Government's policy on paper, however well meaning, does not reflect the reality. I fear that the Government's response to the Select Committee's substantial report is little more than complacent. The committee proposed a national framework, to which the Government answered:
	"The Government accepts such a framework is desirable ... it believes it is being built through the Every Child Matters Change programme".
	But that programme is based around lists of outcomes not processes. On paper, the scheme is laudable, but as evidence from our Select Committee stated:
	"While we feel strongly that local authorities should ensure that every child with ... SEN ... must have access to a diverse range of mainstream and specialist provision ... we do not believe that this is best achieved by a law that specifies outcomes. Rather, we believe it can be best achieved by a law that empowers parents to determine that outcome".
	I could go on. We need a review of SEN provision, of statementing and of the planned relationships between special and mainstream schools, local authorities and, most importantly, parents. That is what these two important amendments are all about. Remember also that we are asking only for a moratorium for six months following the passing of this Bill. I beg to move.

Lord Condon: My Lords, I support in principle the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, and declare an interest as grandfather of a grandson with special educational needs who is currently going through a statementing process. I am in the privileged position to have the time, resources and networking to try to understand that complex process, but I worry about those families who do not have such time or resources to try to find a route through this often confusing maze of statementing in trying to find the best for their children. I have found it difficult to help to find a route map for my grandson in considering schools and special schools. It remains a confusing area, even for those who are best placed to find a way through it. I encourage the Minister to consider these amendments and, at least, to think about a review of statementing, the provision of special schools and so on.

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: My Lords, I, too, support these amendments on the grounds that they are timely. There is no doubt that there have been benefits for many children from the switch of direction and the focus on moving into mainstream schools, but the momentum of the changes is now significant and it is timely to review the system. I have visited a number of schools and have seen that some perverse incentives are now being built into the system, so that schools perhaps start to do what is their interests rather than what is in the interest of the individual.

Lord Northbourne: My Lords, I have been a governor of a special EBD school and I have done much work with children with emotional and behavioural difficulties. When the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, as Secretary of State, put through the Education Bill that gave rise to the big reduction in special schools, I fought it, because I believed that the Government were doing that to save money. I honestly think that it is difficult to treat this problem objectively, because there is a lot of money involved.
	I think that I shall support the Opposition's amendment, because there is a need for an independent look at this problem free from political bias. The opposition Benches are bold in bringing forward their proposal; they may be hoist by their own petard if they were to take over the government of the country. The sort of processes that such an inquiry might introduce could lead to substantial increases in the amount of money that needs to be spent on special needs children—because it is needed.
	That is a different issue from the statementing process, which was a disaster when I was involved with it. Local authorities were delaying it because they knew that once children were statemented they would have to spend the money on looking after those children.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, the amendments focus on the role of special schools. As the Minister responsible for special schools and special educational needs, I should say at the outset that there is no category of schools in our educational system that performs a more valuable or important role than special schools. Special schools often offer the only opportunity that pupils with moderate or severe learning difficulties will ever have for a decent start in life. They have exceptionally good specialist resources that they are able to make available. The Government have no policy whatever of favouring the closure of special schools. Our policy is that the interests of local children must come first, and local authorities, which have a duty to make decisions in this regard, must, as they are required to do under the Education Act 1996, take full account of the needs of pupils in their area in arranging the pattern of provision between schools.
	Perhaps I may back that up, because in my experience there is no better testament to whether the Government take something seriously than whether they are prepared to put money behind it. It is wrong to say that we are not putting resources into either special educational needs at large, on which there has been an almost 50 per cent increase in resources over the past five years, or special schools in particular. Perhaps I may give the House the statistics for special schools. Spending on special schools that are maintained by local authorities has increased since 2000 from £890 million to £1.3 billion. That is a huge increase to enable the quality of provision in those schools to improve. In addition to that £1.3 billion, we also spend £506 million on fees for pupils at independent special schools. That figure is up from £287 million in 2000. So there has been considerable public investment in sustaining and improving the quality of special schools in recent years, and we stand by them.
	Another material factor is that the proportion of pupils with statements who attend special schools has risen over the past three years, and the raw figures on the closure of special schools, of which the noble Baroness has made much, are very misleading. At the local level, we are seeing a good deal of reconfiguration of special educational needs provision in order to improve it. That often includes the amalgamation of special schools that are on totally unsatisfactory sites because there has not been the required level of investment over recent years, or the establishment of units attached to mainstream schools, of which a significant number have opened in recent years. In addition to the 80,000 pupils who attend special schools, 20,000 are located in units that have the same quality of special needs provision but are attached to mainstream schools. That has been a big area of development in recent years.
	There is also resourced provision, by which I mean specialist provision in respect of particular special educational needs provided in mainstream schools. Resourced provision in mainstream schools has increased significantly in both quality and quantity in recent years. Perhaps I may quote Ofsted's judgment in its report, which was published only in July, on the different forms of special educational needs provision. Its conclusions are very pertinent to the discussion that we are having today. It said that there was,
	"little difference in the quality of provision and outcomes for pupils across primary and secondary mainstream schools and special schools. However, mainstream schools with additionally resourced provision"—
	that is, mainstream schools with funding specifically to develop specialist special needs provision—
	"were particularly successful in achieving high outcomes for pupils academically, socially and personally".
	We are supporting the capacity of local authorities, taking account of the interests of their localities, to develop their provision, whether in units, in special schools, which may be reconfigured or brought together, or within mainstream schools. We do not believe that a moratorium on the closure of special schools at present or an inquiry of the kind envisaged by the noble Baroness, which would have the effect of throwing in flux our whole policy on special educational needs, would be desirable.
	I shall finish dealing with Amendment No. 32 by turning to the question of an inquiry. When I became a Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Baker, a former Secretary of State, gave me very good advice. He said that my starting action when considering any issue relating to education policy should be to read the relevant Ofsted report. I have taken that advice to heart, and I always follow it when considering any issue. We have just gone through an exhaustive inquiry with the House of Commons Select Committee on special educational needs, and, as the noble Baroness said, we responded to it in full last week. Ofsted's strong advice to us was not to conduct a fundamental review at present, only two years after the publication of our major policy statement, Removing Barriers to Achievement, which includes an important continuing role for special schools. I shall quote Ofsted's advice to the Select Committee:
	"If we had a big review at this time, the danger is that it would diversify work, resources and developments in such a way that it could send us back to the point of the slow progress that we were having prior to 2004".
	That was the judgment of Ofsted. Brian Lamb, the highly respected chair of the Special Educational Consortium, said the same to us. After we had published our response to the Select Committee, he said that the SEC was very pleased that the DfES had renewed its commitment to its 10-year strategy in Removing Barriers to Achievement. He said:
	"We don't need a radical review. We want to make the system work better. There are lots of things here that will help with that".
	Finally, if I may, I shall quote the judgment of Treehouse, which, as noble Lords will know, is the national charity for autism education and whose president is, I believe, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. It runs the outstanding school in north London for children on the autistic spectrum. When we published our response to the Select Committee, it issued a press release saying that it agreed with the conclusion of the Government, Ofsted and the Special Educational Consortium that the existing evidence does not support a wholesale review of the SEN system or structural reorganisation of local authority commissioning.
	So I believe that we have a substantial body of inspectorate and respected professional opinion behind us in developing our policies in the way that we are, including substantial additional investments. However, I am constantly mindful of the need to keep the existing system under review and to seek to improve it.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, asked me particularly about the statementing process. We considered very carefully whether there was a case for the wholesale replacement of the process, but we decided that that would not be appropriate at present as no proposals have come forward, and none has come forward in our intensive internal consideration, that offer a better prospect than the statementing process at large as a way of allocating resources for those with high levels of special educational needs.
	However, our advisers are working constantly with local authorities to promote best practice in statementing. We want to see much more joint working between local authorities, for example, in the commissioning of provision and in the way in which they manage the statementing process to ensure that outcomes are improved. As the noble Baroness will know, we recently commissioned an audit of low-incidence special educational needs—an area of particular pressure within the special needs community. Our report on that has led to a substantial body of work in joint commissioning between local authorities and to approaches that will improve outcomes of pupils who are statemented and the operation of the statementing process.
	We are very mindful of the need constantly to improve the statementing process and to accelerate the speed with which local authorities deal with statements. There has now been a significant improvement in that but, in response to the Select Committee, we set out a number of new performance indicators that we wish to agree with the Local Government Association to accelerate the issuing of statements and the proper consideration of professional reports, which are essential to the production of statements. So we are constantly seeking to improve the system and we will look at all reasonable proposals to do so.
	However, we do not believe that a fundamental review at present, contrary to the advice of Ofsted and the other professional bodies that I have cited, would be in the best interests of children with special educational needs. Elected local authorities take their responsibilities very seriously in this area, and we think that removing their discretion to improve the arrangements for special educational needs by changing the pattern of local provision, in the way envisaged by Amendment No. 33, would work against, and not in favour of, the interests of children with special educational needs.

Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. I also thank all noble Lords who have supported these amendments, including a former chief inspector of schools. I feel strongly about these amendments. Perhaps I can quote from the Select Committee report, in which one of the Minister's DfES officials said:
	"Certainly Lord Adonis is looking for a review of certain aspects of special educational needs and ministers collectively want to look at a 'third way'".
	The committee said that there must be access to a wide range of mainstream and specialist provision and that,
	"we do not believe that this is best achieved by a law that specifies outcomes".
	The Government's response was that the best way of improving outcomes for children with SEN and disabilities is through sustained action to build the capacity of the system. We need a thorough review in order to build that system.
	I have not at any stage suggested that the Government are not taking this seriously and are not committing resources and, therefore, public investment to the SEN system, But the system has serious faults. Parents feel that they are ignored when local special schools are closed. We need a thorough review. I feel that a thorough review of the system is essential to achieve our aim. All I am asking for is a brief period in which to take stock and to consider carefully how we develop a sustainable system to meet the growing need for SEN provision. Surely the whole system of statementing goes to the heart of that. I hope that noble Lords agree. I wish to test the opinion of the House.

Baroness D'Souza: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Blaker, for providing this opportunity to address once again the awfulness that is going on in Zimbabwe today. The recent arrest, prolonged detention and severe torture of many members of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions is but the latest example of the savage actions of the police. The arrests in mid-September took place before the explicitly announced peaceful demonstrations against the Zimbabwean Government's mismanagement of the economy, which has reduced the country and its citizens to a state of penury and starvation. Those still in detention are at risk of death due to lack of medical attention to the injuries they sustained during torture. This series of arrests and its aftermath are extraordinary, even by the standards set by the Mugabe Government in the past couple of years.
	Now is, perhaps, the time to use the full array of legal, diplomatic and other measures open to the UK and the EU in order to create a critical mass of international opinion and to support those in Zimbabwe who bear the unspeakable brunt of repression. The UK Government, who have had to withstand charges of wishing to re-colonise Zimbabwe, have nevertheless made strong statements against President Mugabe's regime and have supported strong actions, but more can now be done. In particular, the EU, which passed a resolution condemning human rights abuses in Zimbabwe in September, is due to revisit both official and personal travel sanction in January 2007. The noble Lord, Lord Blaker, has already mentioned that there may be some EU countries, notably Portugal, which wish to ease these sanctions. I ask the UK Government to oppose with vigour any such moves to strengthen wherever possible the criteria for their removal, and to vote to keep, and even extend, such sanctions.
	The newly established Human Rights Council, which will convene its third session at the end of November, provides yet another forum in which to initiate and table a further resolution on Zimbabwe. Any resolution should endorse and thereby reaffirm that passed by the council of the Africa Union's African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, if only to try to mitigate the accusation of western interference. At the UN level, there is the opportunity to lobby at the General Assembly, including in the Third Committee on governance and human rights. The Zimbabwean situation has now reached such proportions that it is appropriate to refer Zimbabwe to the Security Council.
	I remind the Minister of the recommendation in the report of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs 2005:
	"We recommend that the United Kingdom start a campaign for the referral of Robert Mugabe to the International Criminal Court for his manifold and monstrous crimes against the people of Zimbabwe".
	Torture in Zimbabwe is widespread, systematic and severe and therefore constitutes a crime against humanity. Under the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court, there is a duty on all those who are signed up to the statute to bring a prosecution at the court in The Hague. Perhaps now is the time to initiate a campaign on that.
	Finally, given the blatant and severe torture committed by the Zimbabwe police, and its approval at the highest level, can the Government encourage the UN to exclude the Zimbabwe police from participating in any international peacekeeping missions, such as UNMIK in Kosovo, where a new group has just been sent?

Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, we owe a great debt to the noble Lord, Lord Blaker, for securing this debate. Mugabe, the great liberation leader, thinks in terms of command operations. Last year, Operation Murambatsvina destroyed the urban population and the urban opposition. Since many of the urban poor had returned, this year Operation Round-Up again removed children and the homeless to the countryside. I am glad to say that those operations were successfully publicised to the world by, among others, the admirable Kate Hoey, and were roundly condemned by the UN rapporteur, Anna Tibaijuka, and after her by Jan Egeland. However, UN agencies inside the country as usual felt unable to act to help the victims unless asked to do so by the Government. Tents were flown in, and tents were rejected and flown out again. The new housing in Operation Garikai, which was allegedly meant for the homeless, was allocated to soldiers, policemen and ZANU-PF.
	However, far worse was to come. It was the creation of command agriculture in Operation Taguta, which means, "eat well". I am indebted to the admirable Solidarity Peace Trust report for the information that follows on this. The military already managed food distribution through the Grain Marketing Board, and now they are also responsible for food production. This has the political advantage that angry, underpaid and demoralised soldiers will be kept active and well fed, whatever happens to the rest. The tragedy is that they know nothing about farming. In irrigation schemes, they have wantonly destroyed cash crops, including some for export, have ordered all established fruit trees to be uprooted, and market gardens, an essential source of income for lack of which most children can no longer be sent to school, have also been destroyed. Plot-holders have been turned into paupers. The military are destroying established crop rotation structures and, in one case, the fertility of the fields through the grossly ignorant over-use of fertilizers. Underpaid, discontented troops have seized whole maize harvests, leaving families with nothing. Needless to say, there is wide corruption and 60 per cent of the funds allocated to agriculture have never reached the farmers, and the same is true of the diesel allocation. Vice-President Mujuru told the farmers that no family should receive more than 10 maize cobs a day from their own fields. Plot-holders must apply to the soldiers to get one maize cob for each family member.
	As if it were not bad enough to be beaten and starved and to see their children lose all hope of school, the farmers see the arbitrary reallocation of plots by the soldiers. This has caused deep anxiety over tenure and the power of the community to make its own decisions. In Matabeleland the brutality of the soldiers and their absolute power has brought back memories of the murderous destruction wrought by the Fifth Brigade in the 1980s. Once more the people are entirely at the mercy of the troops; they are starving; and the government are successfully destroying their independence.
	The harvest was never going to be enough, despite all these recipes for failure, but since Mugabe told the World Food Programme earlier this year that there would be no need for further food aid, WFP food is running out, there are no donors, and a famine is certain. Food distribution will be cut by 60 per cent immediately, and 364,000 school children and 190,000 of the chronically ill are expected to die. We are looking not at the death of a nation but at its murder by its own rulers; and from Anna Tibaijuka and others, we know that the UN, though present and anxious to help, has been rebuffed as has the whole western world.
	However, brave Kate Hoey's most recent incursion has confirmed that there are still many Zimbabweans—trade unionists, the women's movement, the human rights cohort, the Churches and the judiciary—incidentally the brave lawyer Beatrice Mtetra has just been given the Woman of the Year award—who continue bravely to resist and to protest. What they lack is the oxygen of publicity in a world where they cannot speak on the radio or through the press or gather together, and they cannot move around or communicate countrywide for lack of funds. I believe that we have a duty, through trade union links, Bar Councils, women's movements and so forth in the free world, to enable civil society to survive and lead the country. They need funds, support, and to know they have friends.
	As the UN, the large NGOs and government seem paralysed, and the African Union leaders value one cruel and reptilian liberation leader above the suffering of millions, civil society in the free world must act. Very little money would be needed to give a voice to the students, the trade unionists and the other unknown and unsung leaders whom we must help to help themselves. It is vital they should be in place and have an effective national voice when the situation implodes. They, not the UN or the AU, must decide what happens then. The first thing they will want is the return of the rule of law. No squalid bargains must be struck by the world with this loathsome regime to pre-empt the wishes of the people. They must be able to count on the AU, the EU and the UN to enter into no negotiation about the future of the country over their heads.

Lord St John of Bletso: My Lords, I join in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Blaker, for introducing this debate and once again bringing the ongoing plight of Zimbabwe to the attention of your Lordships' House.
	There is a popular saying that pessimism is sensible because pessimists are never disappointed. Unfortunately I have been an optimist for Zimbabwe, and I have been bitterly disappointed. There have been so many false dawns for Zimbabwe and her long-suffering peoples in recent years when it seemed as though a deal would be done and a government of national unity would be established and law and order restored. The essence of most of these initiatives, generally originating in South Africa, is that President Mugabe would agree to step down and a government of national unity would be formed in return for a guarantee that leading members of the ruling ZANU-PF party would be granted amnesty from prosecution.
	There have been times when agreement seemed imminent but the deals have failed, most recently because of the indictment of Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, for human rights crimes. The incident scared Robert Mugabe into believing that the same fate might await him. He therefore prefers to cling to power. In those circumstances, most observers accept that Robert Mugabe will remain as President of Zimbabwe until he dies. Sadly for Zimbabweans, life is worse, and it is likely to get even worse before it gets better.
	Some observers continue to believe that the people of Zimbabwe will rise against their leaders, in much the same way as the people of Romania rose against Ceausescu, and the Ukrainians staged their Orange Revolution. Sadly, I believe that such an uprising in Zimbabwe is extremely unlikely. It did not happen when the Zimbabwean Government launched their cruel operations to bulldoze the stalls and shacks of street traders in Harare in areas where their political opponents are strong. It also did not happen when the opposition MDC recently called for mass action.
	There are two reasons why the people will not protest. First, unfortunately, there is a lack of plausible opposition in the country. The MDC seemed credible in the past but is now deeply divided between those who support Morgan Tsvangirai, a man with charisma but doubtful judgment, and those who support Arthur Mutambara, a man of great intellect but less popular appeal. Secondly, a remarkable 70 per cent, if not more, of Zimbabweans live in rural areas where they remain largely unaware of the government excesses in the urban areas.
	As a result, it is probably true that if a general election was held tomorrow, ZANU-PF would be the clear winners. In fact, the next presidential election is scheduled for 2008, with the next parliamentary election to follow in 2010. There are rumours that the Government intend postponing the presidential election until 2010, giving Mugabe another two years in power. Perhaps the Minister could inform us whether Her Majesty's Government are taking steps to ensure that the presidential election is held in 2008.
	Succession planning is of course a key issue. Whenever Mugabe goes, he will probably be succeeded by one of four main candidates. There is the increasingly prominent and proactive Governor of the Reserve Bank, Gideon Gono, who has presided over the recent devaluation of the currency and clampdown on the parallel currency market. Alternatively, there is the current Vice-President, Joice Mujuru, wife of the powerful retired general, Solomon Mujuru; or even the former Finance Minister, Simba Makoni. The other alternative would be Emmerson Mnangagwa, the former Speaker of Parliament.
	The sub-plot to that tussle for power is the struggle between the various clans within the numerically dominant Shona tribe. Mugabe leads the Zezuru clan, while Mnangagwa and Gono are influential members of the Karanga group. Makoni comes from another clan, the Manyika. This difficult situation leaves Her Majesty's Government in a position where they must continue to provide humanitarian aid, where possible, and apply pressure on the Harare regime.
	Despite the irrational ranting of their president, many—in fact, most—Zimbabweans view Britain with deep affection and there is no doubt that, as soon as circumstances allow, this country will be expected to play a major role in the reconstruction of Zimbabwe. In preparation, Her Majesty's Government should start to promote a Marshall aid programme to support the swift recovery of Zimbabwe.
	Finally, I add that we cannot take for granted our pre-eminent position in Zimbabwe, as there are increasing trade contacts between Zimbabwe and Russia and China, which are no doubt making promises that will not necessarily be delivered.
	I wish to end on a more positive note—and I appreciate that I have overstepped my mark by one minute. Zimbabwe remains a country blessed with a relatively strong infrastructure, arable land, precious metals and minerals and a highly educated and literate workforce. Mercifully, the landscape is not strewn with landmines, as in the nearby states of Mozambique and Angola. The fundamentals remain in place and, when the time comes, Her Majesty's Government must be ready to lead the recovery and to incentivise and motivate the international community to rebuild that wonderful country. That time, please God, will not be too far away.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Blaker, on having introduced this important debate. It is timely, but, tragically, debates on Zimbabwe are always timely. I also add my gratitude to all other noble Lords who have spoken, for their continued engagement and interest in resolving this crisis. I join the noble Lord, Lord Blaker, in his congratulations to the wide spectrum of organisations in Zimbabwe on the way in which they have sustained the struggle in very difficult circumstances. It is right that we should acknowledge it. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Park, in commending many of those who have maintained their dynamism in the most adverse circumstances.
	Let me deal immediately with some of the points that have been put. I understand the argument for trying to engage the international community in the responsibility to protect, which the Government took a major part in helping to design for the United Nations. It is a sign of the creative thinking of the House that we have turned to it. This is no easy matter. The first attempt to get the international community to engage with a responsibility to protect—in Security Council Resolution 1706 on Darfur—took a huge amount of work. Even then, three abstentions were visible in the most appalling of circumstances—two were fortunately abstentions rather than votes against by veto-carrying members of the permanent membership of the Security Council. If we can drive this policy through on Darfur, we will have taken an extremely large step forward. I do not believe that there is at the moment the basis for even that degree of support in the Security Council. I would hate to hand Mugabe another victory of that kind until we can drive it through successfully.
	I commend the realism shown by the noble Lord, Lord St John of Bletso, for the difficulties inside Zimbabwe in making progress. But I continue to believe that there is a lot that we can do and that we should do it. Of course, the general election in 2008 will, I hope, be a clean election, not a rigged election or an election characterised by the kinds of unreasonable pressure that have been put on people in other elections, and that that election goes ahead and is on time.
	I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Astor of Hever, is, like me, a student of Labour Party conferences and the speeches made. I do not truly accept that we are timid, but I acknowledge how hard it is to find the levers that work, because they are what we need. We consistently try to find where we can identify the forces for change. The noble Lord quite rightly reminds us of the deal on Africa, which has produced a degree of movement—not enough, but, I repeat, a degree of movement—among some heads of African states, to which I shall return.
	I share the concerns across the Chamber. As the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, said, Zimbabwe is a failing state. Despite abundant rains, the World Food Programme reckons that nearly 2 million people will face hunger in the coming months; I believe that the figure will be larger than that. Poverty deepens, more and more people are unable to afford the food that is available and 80 per cent of the population are unemployed, many of whom are in jobs that earn way below the bread-line. As has been pointed out, official inflation is at 1,200 per cent and rising: in reality, it is probably almost twice that figure now. The IMF has suggested that without reform, as the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, said, it will reach 4,000 per cent by the beginning of 2007. This is an economy that has collapsed.
	There are widespread shortages of basic food commodities and fuel, and constant interruptions in the supply of electricity and water. Three million people—one-quarter of the population—have already fled the country. For those who are left behind, as we have heard in the debate, life expectancy is the lowest in the world, and it is getting worse: 34 for women and 37 for men. Yet, despite all that, the Government of Zimbabwe refuse to acknowledge that they have any responsibility.
	The Government ignore international calls for reform and crack down on the attempts of ordinary Zimbabweans to raise their concerns about the situation, most recently, as we saw, in the brutal suppression of a demonstration held by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions on 30 September. So I share the view that it is a failing state, as I share the view that the world trade union movement, which has a fine history in this respect, will respond to what has happened with practical help, as it has historically elsewhere. I join others in congratulating my honourable friend Kate Hoey on the support she has given recently to the trade unions and others.
	However, I have also noted the way in which Zimbabweans have blamed others for the crisis they have brought upon themselves. Joseph Made, the agriculture Minister, who has presided over the collapse, in the past has blamed falling production in agriculture on helicopter pilots who flew too high and as a result could not distinguish between maize and lush grass. He has blamed birds for consuming the harvest. Most recently he has said that the harvest as a whole failed because of a monkey. He said that investigations showed that a monkey dived into a transformer,
	"and sabotaged our preparations for the coming season".
	That is the reason given for the failure of the harvest. The saddest thing of all is that when this was reported to the Zimbabwean Parliament, it was accepted without demur. That tells a story in itself. The monkey, of course, has taken its secrets to the grave.
	Most Zimbabweans understand these problems very well. They understand the solutions that are required. Like the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, I pay tribute to them because they have always grasped these facts. Many even in ZANU-PF know that the party must change or it will lose everything. They see the manifest absurdity of the mistakes that were described so vividly by the noble Baroness, Lady Park of Monmouth. But Mugabe still opposes reform and Zimbabweans need to move beyond his leadership or they will decline, and the decline will accelerate. I also recognise, because it is important, that there is increasing militarisation throughout the Zimbabwean economy, with military people taking up command roles in the economy. In my view that reflects the dependence of this regime—an increasing dependence—on the military for its security.
	How should we respond? Mugabe continues to describe the crisis as a bilateral issue backed, as he argues, by illegal "economic sanctions". It is not a bilateral issue and there are no economic sanctions. The crisis in Zimbabwe is caused by bad governance and bad policies. The crisis is between a dictatorial regime and a subjugated people, and it can only be reversed by significant political reform, including the repeal of damaging legislation on human and property rights, as noble Lords have said, together with a comprehensive economic reform package as already set out by the IMF. The noble Lord, Lord Astor of Hever, asked what we are doing. I can tell him that one of the things we have been doing is to take part in the design of some of the programmes which we believe, if they could be accepted, would make a fundamental difference—and to provide those to the international community and the opposition. But I think it is recognised that much of the reform effort necessarily still has to come from within Zimbabwe. International pressure should be maintained to encourage the Government to heed some voices of reason. Many of those voices will come from within Zimbabwe and we will continue to encourage and assist if we can human rights defenders and those working for democratic change, in concert with the EU, the UN and other international partners. Further, I can assure the House that our embassy in Zimbabwe, often working in great difficulty, works on this project all the time. We have heard David Coltart and others from the Zimbabwean opposition expressing similar views in London recently.
	I do not think that Zimbabwe will ever go off the international radar screen, as I emphasised in my Statement on 14 September after the crackdown on the union demonstrations. I add that my right honourable friend Ian McCartney summoned the Zimbabwean ambassador and told him in the strongest possible terms that it will not go off the radar screen that these are our concerns, and the EU joined us in making those criticisms.
	Concern has been expressed about Africa's response to the crisis. I have said before in the House that we press Africa to do more. After all, the impact of the collapse of Zimbabwe on the region has been huge. Hunger-fuelled migration is causing problems and regional trade has been affected. The Zimbabwe Research Initiative has estimated that between 2000 and 2002 the economic crisis in the country cost SADC in the region of $2.5 billion. If that was carried through to the present day, South Africa's economy, had it been able to help to resolve this problem, would be 3 per cent bigger than it is. Above all, Africa's credibility is at stake in promoting good governance as set out in NePAD and the Commission for Africa. African credibility will be damaged unless it is possible to confront the problems of Zimbabwe.
	Africa is increasingly frustrated. The noble Lord, Lord Blaker, and my noble friend Lord Acton both raised questions about South Africa. The South African deputy foreign Minister has said that his government is concerned not only about the effects on the people of Zimbabwe but also about the impact on the region as a whole. Indeed, the hastening economic implosion will see millions of people trying to cross the Limpopo in search of food and a degree of security. I should say to my noble friend Lord Acton that we hold talks with South African representatives all the time, and we have seen some pressure begin to be put on through the IMF.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, the United Nations, the Commission for Africa and everyone else has consistently worked to try to bring about a change in attitude within the African Union and elsewhere to Zimbabwe. Efforts have been made in all of those settings in order to get accurate reports of the disastrous policies and the particular assaults that have been launched against the people of Zimbabwe as part of the human rights perspective which has to be corrected. We will continue to do that.
	Briefly, the UK has pressed for and achieved at the UN a firm reference to Zimbabwe in the EU's general statement to the United Nations General Affairs Human Rights Committee. As many noble Lords have noted, we are engaged in providing humanitarian help. We believe that the UN must become more engaged politically; the situation in Zimbabwe merits United Nations Security Council consideration and the collapse makes it more urgent. We also took the opportunity to raise Zimbabwean issues in the UNSC in September following the general humanitarian briefing by Jan Egeland, which was also mentioned in the debate. We will continue to look for opportunities to ensure that Zimbabwe remains on the Security Council agenda. However, sanctions must continue. This involves not just Portugal but quite a number of countries. All sorts of reasons are produced on the day, but we are determined to fight hard to keep the sanctions in place.
	There are prospects and difficulties in this crisis and there is a range of views among our partners as to how best to address it. We need to ensure that those views include tough sanctions. I am clear that for democracy to be reinvented and reintroduced in the country, it is vital that the trade unions, the Churches and civil society organisations get the vigorous help that they need from us. I commend the TUC on its decision to hold a conference on 4 November; I believe that it will be of great help.
	The victims of Mugabe's self-inflicted crisis in Zimbabwe are Zimbabweans—the vulnerable, the homeless, the orphans, the hungry and those suffering from HIV/AIDS. I am proud that our Government has addressed those questions through DfID and have provided more than £38 million of humanitarian support in the last financial year alone to improve food security for 1.5 million of the poorest people in the world.
	At UNGA this year, Mugabe warned the west that every Goliath has its David. He has continued to use his political weight in the country to oppress and bully his people into apparent submission, but he should heed his own words: let this David tell him that his policy is creating millions of Davids within Zimbabwe and millions more in the Diaspora. He should reflect on that. The time for his regime has gone.

Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
	[The Sitting was suspended from 2.41 to 2.43 pm.]

Baroness Massey of Darwen: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that remark. I think that we agree that assemblies are useful to introduce all kinds of topics that should be considered as part of a spiritual dimension within a school.
	Many of us in this House today will keep a close eye on what happens to young carers on whatever agenda may come up in forthcoming policy and legislation. The Minister has indicated strong support for the spirit of this amendment. Much progress has been made, and guidance will reinforce the support for young carers and families that we all require and think is a good idea. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford: My Lords, in moving Amendment No. 58, I shall also speak to Amendments Nos. 60 to 69 and 71. I shall speak briefly about the former amendments, as the main debate should be about the ideas put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on the various experimental admissions procedures that he proposes in his amendments, which I think are interesting and which all seek to make admissions systems fairer in different ways.
	Amendment No. 58 seeks to make applications anonymous by removing the names of the applicants, so that the only factors that apply are the criteria laid down in the admissions policies set out both in the code of admissions and by the relevant school or local education authority, whichever is the admissions authority. Sometimes these factors are proximity, Church membership—in the case of faith schools—or banding, for a local education authority. The whole notion of anonymised admissions means that admission cannot be influenced by preferences such as ethnic origin, which can be told from names, or by staff acquaintance or any other such factor.
	When we raised this matter in Committee, I mentioned that it had been favoured by the Commons Select Committee when it considered the White Paper proposals. We were somewhat disappointed that the Government had not taken up that suggestion. The Minister was surprisingly encouraging in his response. He said on 18 July at col. 1275 of Hansard that the Government might take up that suggestion in the future but that for the moment it was "a step too far". He saw one obstacle as the current state of IT systems. But in all conscience, given the number of examination papers that over the years have been submitted and marked anonymously, I cannot see why that should pose a problem. We realise that large IT systems have caused the Government problems but that does not necessarily seem to inhibit them putting forward proposals for even bigger systems; for example, the development of a computer database itemising all children on the national children's register and an even bigger database covering identity cards. But in this case any such system would have to be administered not by central government but by local authorities. A lot of local authorities have shown themselves adept at handling the size of database that would be required.
	The Minister also mentioned the sibling issue. Since the Government have in their current admissions code come down against schools giving preference to siblings, that seems to me irrelevant. From a personal point of view I believe that there is a good case for giving preference to siblings. Even if such preference were to be given, it seems to me that it could be well handled within such a database.
	We have retabled the amendment because we did not consider that either of the two objections—the fact that a database would be required to handle the anonymised applications and the sibling issue—held much water. We are anxious to press the Government to give the matter a little more consideration. As I say, in this context it might fit well alongside one of the pilots and the various schemes suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I have added my name to his Amendment No. 71, which suggests that oversubscribed state schools should allocate a proportion of places via a ballot. We were particularly attracted to his amendment in Committee that a school might allocate some 75 per cent of its places on the basis of proximity or faith based criteria and put the remaining 25 per cent up for ballot. His proposals are now slightly different but I shall let him argue his case for himself.
	I wish to speak to Amendments Nos. 60 to 69, including Amendments Nos. 60A and 60B, which were originally overlooked. This whole series of amendments, which we have tabled on behalf of the LGA, seek to amend Clause 40 to put a duty on local authorities to produce a report on admissions rather than just giving the power—it is a question of may rather than must—to admission forums to do so. It is worth remembering that admission forums act in effect as agencies for local government and are composed of representatives from local schools as well as LEA officials. Their job is to sort out admissions, given the criteria laid down by the code of admissions and by the appropriate admission authority at the local level. They work for and are answerable to local government and the schools that are the admission authorities at that level.
	It is also worth remembering that Clause 1 places a new duty on local authorities to ensure fair access to educational opportunity. Admissions are a crucial part of fulfilling that duty. Being required to produce a regular report would strengthen the hand of local authorities in fulfilling their strategic role in overseeing the fair admissions process. Moreover, it is logical that as the body responsible for ensuring fair access, and given that the admission forum is answerable to the local authority, it should be the local authority rather than the admission forum that is ultimately responsible for producing the report. It should, of course, be written in consultation with the admission forum. That is why we have drafted Amendment No. 60 to read:
	"A local education authority in England, in consultation with the admission forum for that local education authority area, must".
	The report would encompass all state schools in that area including academies and city technology colleges. In the amendments, on the one hand there is the notion that in applying for schools the name of the child should be taken away when they are being considered by the local admission forums so that the application is in all respects anonymous. Secondly, there is the idea that the report on how admissions are working should be a responsibility of the local education authority. Both seem to us to be reasonable amendments. I hope that the Government will look favourably on them. I beg to move.

Lord Lucas: My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments Nos. 71 to 73. At present, we have a state system that is almost entirely socially selective, or where it is not it is capable of being socially selective. Those with money and the ability to manipulate their own lives can choose where they live and overcome any geographical criterion, can tutor their child or send them to private schools as the ultimate form of tutoring to get into grammar schools, which is why they have captured that sector of the state market, or they can, and do in large quantities, suddenly become religious to qualify for Catholic or Church of England schools. I observe all of this in my daily life as editor of the Good Schools Guide.
	I applaud parents wanting to do better for their children. It is a great motivating force and a great good. It is something that we should all encourage. We have let this great force act entirely for the benefit of the people who are applying it. We ought, ought we not, to have learnt from Adam Smith that where you have a great force of this nature—in Adam Smith's case the desire to better oneself financially—it can be harnessed to the good of society, and then everyone benefits from it. That is really what we ought to be trying to do in schools, and it seems to me that there are various ways of going about it. One obvious one, which might appeal to my Front Bench, is to allow anyone to establish a state school whenever they wanted to; to have complete freedom of establishment of state schools, so that if someone wanted a good state school in an area where there was not one they could go out and establish one. That is a fairly expensive way of doing it, but it is certainly theoretically attractive. I do not think that it will work with this Government, and I do not think it is on the cards in the near future.
	We can look at improving admission arrangements to see whether we can make sure that at least an element of them is not capable of social manipulation, or at least is very difficult to manipulate socially. The Government are trying this a bit through banding, but where banding has been in place for a while, say with some of the early city technology colleges, the middle classes are getting pretty good at working it. You get to know the pattern, and you say to your kid, "Come on, we want you to do a bit worse than that". You make sure they get in to band B or band C so that they can get the admissions from where you are living. It is all a process that is capable of manipulation.
	The system that I like is the one that is not often employed, but I came across it first with Haberdashers' Hatcham, which is one of the new academies where they have gone for balloted admissions. If you set the bounds of your ballot sufficiently wide—Hatcham has it at three miles—you can encompass such a broad section of the population and such a large number of houses that it becomes pretty impossible to predict whether you will get in on a ballot from any particular location. There are certainly no other known ways of working a ballot. So you open a good school up—and Haberdashers' Hatcham is a good school—to anyone regardless of their ability to take advantage of conventional means of admission. It seems to me that ballots have the potential to open up schools in a way that grammar schools used to; to anyone. The old grammar school system—which had many iniquities and which I did not support—at least allowed people to get on to the educational ladder from wherever they happened to be in society. We need to produce something that has that breadth, and ballots seem to me to be the way to do it.
	Given that, how do we get there? Amendment No. 71 is an exploration of how we get there. I do not think you can do it straight away. You cannot come in and suddenly say that 25 per cent of school admissions shall be by ballot. You disturb communities too much, and you disturb reasonable parental expectations of what the system would look like. You would find yourself immediately unpopular with a large section of society and it is not doable.
	However, even those who benefit most from the current system have a strong social conscience. Many of the people who play the current system hard are fervent Guardian readers with deep social consciences, who would be delighted at the idea that they were bringing other people with them in the success that they were finding for their children. There is no doubt also that the breadth of middle-class England would wish to see the whole community benefit from the sort of good schools that their children were going to.
	If balloting is introduced gradually, and I propose that it is brought in at 5 per cent and then in gradual 5 per cent increments—although that could be faster, but there would be no compulsion—a predictable move towards 25 per cent would be introduced and be acceptable to those who benefit from the current system, but, within a reasonable time in the context of educational timescales, would achieve a much fairer admissions system.
	Subsection (3) of my amendment is concerned with grammar and faith schools. After all, by their nature, they draw children from a wide geographical spread. Is it enough to say that those schools should have geographical selection, as well? I suspect that the answer is that it is not. As the Minister knows, I do not accept the arguments made by faith schools that admitting pupils from outside the faith destroys the faith element of the school and I certainly do not believe that accepting pupils who are not academically tip-top destroys the ethos of a grammar school.
	There are many successful bilateral schools in this country where there is a strong academic stream and an un-selected stream. They mix extremely well and, although there is an academic ethos, such schools have the virtue of producing a broad spread of pupils. That is a successful model; so I do not believe that grammar schools would suffer from being required to have balloted admissions. If it were left completely up to me, I would probably leave out subsection (3), so that every school would have to have unconditional ballots.
	Amendment No. 72 looks at the issue from the other side. Many parents want to know where their children are going, want to choose a good local school and do not want to be thrown into a cauldron in which they might not be accepted by any of the schools that they select. They want certainty. Balloted admission systems would produce a guaranteed place for those pupils. That, too, would be done gradually.
	In good schools, all admissions would be by guaranteed place to begin with, because everyone who lived locally would want their children to go to a good school. You would then say to that school, "You have either to expand and take on some extra places that, in time, would be filled by ballot, or gradually you have to reduce the number of guaranteed places to make room for the balloted places". Thereby, a system could evolve in which every child has a guaranteed place and every school has approaching 25 per cent of its places allocated by ballot. The whole system would balance between one year and another—not perfectly in any particular year but, if there is an imbalance, it would gradually work itself out and produce a much fairer system. The guaranteed element would thus produce a system that would be welcome to those who did not wish to take part in a fully balloted system.
	Clearly, that complicated system could not be enacted merely by a Back-Bench amendment at a late stage in the Bill, but perhaps we can open things up so that local education authorities can explore that route and propose systems to the Government whereby these two characteristics can be brought into play in local admission systems. Amendment No. 73 would allow the Government to run a few pilots to see how the system would work and, after 10 years, we could come back and say, "This is the way we want to go".

Lord Adonis: My Lords, I said that it would not be desirable; I did not say that it was not possible. All things are possible within an enlightened Government such as this one, but I was saying that it would not be desirable to do so. Given that it is not the Government's policy, nor, I believe that of Parliament, to remove the capacity of faith schools to receive state funding, this would be a major obstacle to being able to move in the direction favoured by the noble Lord.
	I am a strong supporter of the Mayor of London but his capacity to wave a magic wand in this area is going to be limited unless there is another whole layer of education bureaucracy in London, which is what would happen if the Mayor himself became a responsible agent in school places planning. I think that the local authorities in London, let alone schools, would quail at the prospect of another whole layer of bureaucracy being interposed. I completely understand the ideas put forward by the noble Lord but I think that, although they may be applicable in certain circumstances, this matter will need to continue to be debated before we can make progress in some of the directions that he set out.
	However, in respect of the unconditional ballots to which he referred and which we debated in Committee, we have made a substantial indication in the new school admissions code, which was published recently and which I circulated to noble Lords, about the applicability of random allocation as a legitimate over-subscription criteria for state schools.
	Paragraphs 2.25 to 2.27 set out the circumstances in which that can happen:
	"Random allocation of school places can be good practice particularly for urban areas and secondary schools".
	I believe that is the context the noble Lord had in mind, where social segregation can be particularly pronounced. However, it notes that it may not be suitable in rural areas where there is not the capacity for individuals to move so easily between schools.
	Paragraphs 2.26 and 2.27 set out how we believe that random allocation should work:
	"If admissions authorities decide to use random allocation when schools are oversubscribed they need to set out clearly how this will be operated, and must ensure that arrangements are transparent. They should undertake a fresh round of random allocation when deciding who should be offered a place from a waiting list, and should not use the results of an earlier round of random allocation, as this would disadvantage those who had applied for a place at the school after the first random allocation was carried out".
	I cite that to show we have been giving serious thought to how this could work in practice and the guidance that we can give to schools. We also note that it would be desirable that admissions authorities should ensure that random allocations are supervised by someone independent of the school. I hope that that guidance may encourage more of the kinds of policies cited by the noble Lord in respect of Haberdashers and that that may create a climate in which schools are more confident in using such unfamiliar, at present, forms of oversubscription criteria.
	Amendment No. 58, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, to include anonymisation of admissions applications, we still consider to be problematic. I repeat what I said in Committee that, although I will ensure that my officials discuss with local authorities and software suppliers whether there is a cost-effective way to take this forward, we believe that we can move only at the speed at which the administrative processes can cope.
	I reiterate the point about siblings. I believe that the noble Baroness may have been under a misunderstanding about what the school's admissions code says about siblings. It is not correct to say that it states that the admission of siblings is poor practice. I want to establish that clearly as it is a very important issue for schools. Paragraphs 2.10 and 2.11 of the draft admissions code on page 19 make it clear that siblings policies may be reasonable. Paragraph 2.10 states:
	"Giving priority to children who have siblings who will be at the school when they join may support parents of young children. Admission authorities should give consideration particularly to the needs of younger children at primary schools, where parents may have problems with transporting children placed at different schools. Admissions authorities should also carefully consider how twins or triplets or other relatives, including those adopted, living permanently in the household will be treated if a sibling criterion is adopted".
	It is not correct to say that the draft admissions code gives advice to schools against siblings policies. On the contrary, it says that they should carefully consider the needs of parents, particularly in respect of younger children, when placing children in different schools.
	The point which the noble Baroness may have picked up from the media which may have led to her remarks is that we state, in paragraphs 212 and 213, that schools which select by ability or aptitude need to think very carefully about whether siblings policies in those cases are blatantly unfair. They would enable parents who have managed to get one child into the school through a selective criterion to have all their children admitted.
	I make that point because, as the noble Baroness knows, often in schools with a siblings policy a high proportion of the places go to siblings. Where there is a siblings policy, the admissions authority would need to know the names of applicants, or it would need to have addresses from which it could ascertain whether applicants come from the household of a child who is already present at the school. That could be done only by making personal information available to the admissions authority. I elaborate that point to make it clear that there are significant practical issues in taking forward what I accept would be desirable in principle—that admissions should be more anonymised—so that the school system is, and is seen to be, fairer.
	Amendments Nos. 60 to 69 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, would require a local authority, in consultation with the admissions forum, to prepare and publish reports on admissions matters in its area. There is no need to place such a requirement on local authorities. They already have powers to make reports as they see fit. There is no whatever limitation on a local authority's power to act in this area. The Local Government Association seems to want us to oblige local authorities to do things that they are at perfect liberty to do anyway, an unusual position for it to adopt. It is normally against us telling authorities to do things they have the power to do or not to do. I am prepared to rest on the maturity of local authorities to make these decisions for themselves without us needing to tell them to do so.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, is concerned that our proposed process for reviewing admissions arrangements is not sufficiently robust. I hope I can satisfy her that that is not so. First, as she said, the Bill will make the admissions regime much tougher. The new code is much more stringent in the requirements it places on schools and the limitations it places on practices, such as interviewing, that we do not regard as desirable but that none the less were taking place. Schools must act in accordance with it; it is not sufficient for them simply to have regard to it. The Bill strikes out certain practices, such as interviewing, that were permissible. So the regime governing admissions is both fairer and tougher under the Bill.
	Secondly, admissions forums will have the power to produce a report on the effectiveness of admissions arrangements. That will include judging the extent to which local admission arrangements support diversity, including the ethnic and social mix of schools. On our first day on Report I read out the guidance given in respect of those admissions forums, which is very clear on these duties, as is the new draft admissions code which has come out since that guidance. Paragraph 4.10 says:
	"Admissions Forums have a key role in ensuring a fair admissions system that promotes social equity".
	It goes on to say that admissions forums should assess how well the admissions arrangements,
	"serve the interests of local parents and children collectively, and try to promote agreement on admissions issues"
	That is a significant move forward from the previous regime.
	Thirdly, the new school admissions code requires admission authorities to adopt arrangements which support social cohesion and diversity. Forums will have a new right of objection in cases where arrangements do not comply with requirements in the code or follow its guidelines. The forums can lodge objections with the adjudicator, which is a new power that gives a much more immediate local response to perceived unfairness in admissions practices than was possible before.
	In addition to those three measures, fourthly, we come to the schools commissioner and his role in undertaking the national review of fair admissions. The noble Baroness thinks that we do not go far enough and proposes an independent body but, in fact, we have gone considerably further than before. Before the appointment of the schools commissioner with his duties in respect of fair admissions, no national body had such responsibility, whereas under the new regime the new schools commissioner, Sir Bruce Liddington, will take account of admission forums' reports and other data to produce a report every two years on how local admissions support fair access. In doing so, he will consult all the groups set out in proposed subsection (4) of the amendment, and the Government have undertaken that we will lay his report before Parliament, where it will be subject to the scrutiny of both Houses when it is so laid.
	In conclusion, the time to judge whether the regime is working is when the schools commissioner has laid that report. I note that in her amendment the noble Baroness does not envisage her independent review being completed within three years anyway, so if the new regime that we intend to put in place, which is a significant advance, is found not to be sufficiently robust, the time to return to it is when we see how it is actually working. We should not do what we fear would happen under the amendment: set in place yet another layer of bureaucracy in the system, over and above that which we are already introducing with the admissions forums and the schools commissioner.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
	Clause 40 [Role of admission forums]:
	[Amendments Nos. 60 to 70 not moved.]
	[Amendments Nos. 71 and 72 not moved.]
	Clause 45 [Restrictions on alteration of admission arrangements]:

Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, we move now to a large group of fairly cohesive amendments on special educational needs. In moving Amendment No. 81, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 82 and 82B, which stand in my name, and shall make a few comments on others along the way. First, I will give three short quotes from the Government's response to the Education and Skills Committee report on special educational needs, which was published only a couple of weeks ago. I should like to demonstrate that I accept that the Government are moving in the right direction.
	First, on page 4, paragraph 4, the Government said:
	"Children with SEN can do well in all types of school—access to high quality, specialist teachers and a commitment by leaders to create opportunities to include all pupils are the keys to success".
	Secondly, on page 15, paragraph 40, they said:
	"Schools should take action to build staff capacity, improving the confidence of all staff in their ability to support children with a wide range of needs".
	Thirdly, on page 18, paragraph 3, they said:
	"The Government shares the Committee's view that a skilled workforce is critical to achieving the five Every Child Matters outcomes for children and young people with SEN and/or disabilities".
	I agree with all that. In Committee, when similar amendments to ours were tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, the Minister said, at col. 330 of the Official Report on 5 July, that he agreed with the underlying principles. I hope that he will forgive us today for pressing him further. As I said, I accept that we all want to achieve the same ends, but some of us are always asking for more and better.
	Amendment No. 81 proposes that professional standards for teachers at all levels,
	"should be required to demonstrate an understanding of special educational needs".
	The SEN code of practice asserts that all teachers are teachers of children with special educational needs. But the Special Education Consortium has concerns about how well teachers are prepared. It believes that a compulsory element at every level of teacher training is essential to ensure that all teachers are properly prepared for their responsibilities and that the best way is to incorporate requirements into professional standards at every level of the service. Noble Lords will notice that higher level teaching assistants are included in paragraph (e).
	Unfortunately, there is evidence that despite the current requirements for initial teacher training, teachers are not sufficiently well prepared. In its 2004 report on special educational needs and disability, Ofsted reported:
	"The quality of teaching seen on the visits for pupils with SEN was of varying quality, with a high proportion of lessons involving pupils with SEN having important shortcomings".
	In 2002, the Audit Commission reported:
	"Many teachers feel under considerable pressure, on the one hand to meet the needs of individual pupils, and on the other to deliver a demanding national curriculum and achieve ever-better test results; research suggests that many feel ill-equipped for this task".
	The difficulties arise in respect of a number of different aspects of teaching disabled pupils and pupils with special educational needs. For example, on planning and monitoring progress, the same Ofsted report found that many schools,
	"undertook too little forward planning to ensure that provision was in place to meet the needs of the pupils with SEN".
	In addition to concerns about the core skills for enabling disabled pupils and those with SEN to learn and progress, Ofsted found a lack of understanding of the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act in respect of the planning duties on schools and the requirements to make reasonable adjustments for disabled pupils.
	We have to accept that the solution is complex and, in many cases, quite costly. Improved outcomes for disabled pupils and pupils with SEN are dependent on the improved knowledge, skills and understanding of those working with and for them. Training holds the key to that. I give every credit to the Government for the large amount of extra money, which the Minister mentioned, to make sure that children with special needs are appropriately dealt with. But, as I said, earlier, we always need more and better.
	The DfES 10-year strategy for SEN, Removing Barriers to Achievement, is quite clear on what the Government want to see. It states:
	"All teachers having the skills and confidence, and access to specialist advice where necessary, to help children with SEN to reach their potential".
	The strategy also sets out the Government's intention to work with the Teacher Training Agency and higher education institutions to ensure that initial teacher training in programmes for CPD provide a good grounding in core skills and knowledge of SEN. I am aware that work has already been commissioned by the TDA for schools to develop programmes on SEN and disability for initial teacher training. However, sadly these will not be compulsory and they are designed for the three and four-year teacher training courses. That will leave teachers on the one-year training course without this input.
	As the Minister pointed out on 5 July:
	"The Secretary of State ... already have the power to set professional standards for teachers".—[Official Report, 5/7/06; col. 333.]
	—and of course does so. But I understand that the current standards for teachers are review. Indeed, in their response to the Select Committee on special needs the Government said:
	"Standards are important, but much depends on how they are achieved in practice".
	Will the Minister examine with the TDA, institutes of higher education, Ofsted and other relevant bodies how SEN and disability can be incorporated into the full range of training, in particular the one-year postgraduate teacher training courses where there is very little time to devote to it, and I do not underestimate the challenge of that fact.
	I turn now to Amendment No. 82. This amendment would strengthen the existing duty on local authorities to provide special education, explicitly stating that a range of different types of provision is required. It would also require local authorities to report on how this range of provision meets the range of special educational needs which exist in its own local area. For example, although it is unlikely, if an authority were to rely entirely either on inclusion in mainstream or on special schools, it must justify that decision. So I should like to question the Government further on securing access to a range of special educational provision and how the guidance they have announced will achieve this.
	While the Bill aims for choice and diversity in provision for children without disabilities, that is not a reality for many parents of children with autism or other disabilities unless adequate and appropriate specialist and mainstream places are available in their area. A recent report by the National Autistic Society entitled Make School Make Sense found three things: first, that 66 per cent of parents believe their choice was constrained by a lack of provision; secondly, that half of parents believed their child's current placement was not the best school for them; and, thirdly, that 30 per cent of secondary school pupils with autism have to travel out of their local authority to access a suitable school. I accept that, realistically, it is sometimes the best choice for them. As a result of these findings, Make School Make Sense called for a range of provision to be enshrined in legislation. The House of Commons Education and Skills Select Committee has endorsed that recommendation, stating:
	"The Government should ... implement a statutory requirement for local authorities to maintain a broad-ranging and flexible continuum of provision which should be monitored on a regular basis".
	Current law requires local authorities to have regard to the need to ensure that special education provision is secured for pupils who have special educational needs. It does not of course specify what sort of provision is made, and it is right and proper that that is left to local authorities to decide, based on local need, as long as the provision is of sufficiently high quality. The Government's recent response to the Select Committee's report agreed that access to a range of provision is a desirable goal, but stated strongly that it is the role of local authorities rather than central government to decide on the organisation of special education provision in the area. I agree with the Government on that. The amendment is not intended to restrict local authorities but to present a way of ensuring that provision meets local needs and is reported on to demonstrate how these needs are met.
	Local authorities vary enormously in how they provide and I believe this matter should be in the public domain. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, drew attention to it at Committee stage. For example, there is almost a fivefold difference in the proportion of pupils with statements in different authorities, from 1.08 per cent of all pupils having statements in Nottinghamshire to 4.83 per cent in Halton in Cheshire. In addition, the percentage of pupils placed in maintained special schools varies from zero to 60 per cent across different local authorities. The percentage in mainstream schools varies from 19 to 73 per cent. The variation across local authorities in placing pupils in independent special schools runs from 0.4 per cent to over 19 per cent. This is a remarkable level of variation and demonstrates the extent to which local authorities decide their own strategies for the provision for children with SEN.
	In 2002, the Audit Commission believed that this was an unacceptable level of variation in provision between different parts of the country and stated that it continued to be,
	"especially concerned about pupils with low incidence needs (such as autism and multi-sensory impairment) and those with a disability, who are potentially the most disadvantage pupils in the educational system".
	In 2004, Ofsted echoed that concern. It found that lack of strategic planning was common and services available in any one area varied considerably.
	There are many examples of very good practice and I will give one. As noble Lords might expect, it is a Liberal Democrat council—Liverpool. Over the past five years there have been enormous changes in Liverpool. They began by Liverpool being cited by the Centre of Studies on Inclusive Education as the least inclusive local authority in the country because it had a higher proportion of children in special schools than elsewhere. It believed that this was too simplistic an analysis; however, very serious attention was paid to what could be done. Of serious concern at that time were the 600 pupils in moderate learning difficulty schools. They were no less able than many pupils in mainstream. Their special school status was often based on parental pressure, on mainstream school rejection or a response to bullying, which should have been dealt with by the mainstream school. Some among them had more complex learning needs but many passed a number of GCSEs. Ofsted particularly identified this group as being educated separately for no good reason.
	Liverpool's revised policy contains the following elements. It statements only where necessary. It says why go through the process with a deaf child when their special need is quite obvious; you should simply access the appropriate school place without delay, and that is what it did. It has also returned pupils from expensive out of city places where their needs can be met locally with some support. It has paid a lot of attention to early intervention and some early years assessment provision has been relocated into mainstream sites, where separate education assessment can take place but opportunities for integration in selective classroom situations can be maximised. It has developed 20 resource bases, which are frequently identified by Ofsted as excellent, five resource-plus schools encapsulated within mainstream sites, several reserved bases for SEN on mainstream sites, pupil referring services and services for children with social and behavioural problems. Liverpool has not had a dogmatic special schools or not special schools approach; it has assessed individual needs and matched provision accordingly.
	The glue that cements all this together is the £1.4 million that funds the special schools to provide outreach support to the mainstream schools and their learning networks. While the press and some of us politicians bicker about inclusion, Liverpool is one of a number of authorities that has got on with assessing children and meeting their needs. The amount of money spent on SEN has kept well in line with inflation, if not exceeded it.
	What is as important as all these structural things is that individual schools have a culture of inclusion and communicate that to the children. Only this morning I heard about a school where sixth-form pupils were encouraged to sit with some of the children with special needs lower down the school. That had great benefits for all of them; being closer in age, they could identify with each other quite well. It did the children with special needs good and helped the sixth formers to understand and help children with special needs. Indeed, one or two of them went on to work with children with special needs.
	Amendment No. 82B would not just require that all SEN co-ordinators were qualified teachers with an understanding of legislation relevant to the post and experience to support them; it would also ensure that they were part of the school's senior management team and received appropriate ongoing training. A consensus has emerged on the value that the role of SEN co-ordinator brings to a school when the person is authoritative and informed. This is a probing amendment to confirm the Government's intentions regarding SENCOs following their response to the Education and Skills Committee report on SEN. The part of the response that said that the person taking on the lead responsibility should be a teacher and a member of the senior leadership team in the school was most welcome. In addition, the letter of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, of 12 October made it clear that the Government intend SENCOs to be teachers.
	Government Amendment No. 140 requires governing bodies to appoint a SENCO to co-ordinate the provision of education for children with SEN and gives the Secretary of State a power to make regulations relating to the role. However, the National Autistic Society and the Special Educational Consortium are still keen to receive assurances from the Minister, which I hope he can give us today, that the language of the legislation will be clear in stating that a SENCO must be not just a teacher but a member of the senior leadership team of the school. When he speaks to Amendment No. 140, it will be useful to hear more about the Government's planned requirements for the role.
	I am sorry that I have spoken for so long, but I cannot resist having a very brief word about the excellent amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, in particular Amendment No. 117A. I have no doubt that, when she speaks to it, she will remind noble Lords that many young people who are excluded from school have special educational needs or disabilities. It is not fair that the provision that the school has been making for a child is judged along with that child when exclusion is considered. For many children, exclusion is partly due to the fact that they have not been provided for appropriately in the school, and have kicked out in response. However, I leave that to what will no doubt be an excellent speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. I beg to move.

Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments Nos. 117 and 125. The amendments address real and, I am certain, unintended consistencies in provision for children with special needs in mainstream schooling. Amendment No. 117 is a new amendment tabled to address the inconsistency in discipline guidelines for children with special needs in mainstream schools as opposed to special schools.
	Existing guidance discriminates against SEN children in mainstream schools. There are two main pieces of guidance dealing with physical restraint. Circular 10/98 gives guidance on physical restraint in all schools. It clarifies the acceptable use of reasonable physical force, recommends that schools have a specific policy on restraint, which parents must be informed about, recommends that schools keep records of physical restraint and states that, normally, only authorised staff are allowed to use restraint and that training or guidance may be needed for teachers. However, there is a separate set of guidance for teachers in special schools. The document is called Guidance on the Use of Restrictive Physical Interventions for Staff Working with Children and Adults who Display Extreme Behaviour in Association with Learning Disability and/or Autistic Spectrum Disorders. However, in spite of its title, it deals only with SEN children in special schools. The introduction states:
	"Whilst ... this guidance will have wider relevance and implications for children in mainstream schools ... this guidance is not intended to cover all forms of extreme behaviours in all schools".
	What is more, the 2002 guidance for SEN children in special schools states:
	"Staff who are expected to employ restrictive physical interventions will require additional, more specialised training".
	There is clearly a huge disparity between disciplinary provision for children with special needs in mainstream provision and in SEN schooling. This inconsistency needs to be addressed. I am concerned that Sir Alan Steer was instructed not to look at SEN discipline provision in his report on discipline. I fear that this has severe ramifications for the effectiveness of this Bill's provisions.
	The freer use of "reasonable force" and the clarification achieved by this Bill is welcome. However, teachers who are not trained to deal with the specific disciplinary problems associated with special needs and behavioural problems are at a disadvantage, and the children with whom they deal are at risk of completely unintentional mishandling, which can be of great detriment to their personal development.
	I must make it absolutely clear that I warmly applaud the fantastic job that teachers do educating children with special needs alongside their mainstream duties. Their forbearance and sensitivity sets an example to us all. My amendment would ensure that their efforts are well prepared for and well supported in both training and continual professional development.
	The second amendment will ensure that children with special educational needs who are excluded from schools are not placed in other schools until their statement has been reassessed in the light of their progress or lack thereof. There is a disparity between the provisions of this Bill and the requirements of the 1996 Education Act, which requires an amended statement for the child to designate a suitable school for them to attend. The process must now involve 15 days of consultation, followed by a maximum eight-week period during which the proposed statement must be put forward. That is a confusing message for parents, teachers and local authorities, which, under this Bill, must provide a new school place for children within five days. Parents acting under the 1996 Act would be culpable under this Bill. It is often the case that children with statements may well be better provided for at home during the interim.
	I made clear in Committee and on the previous grouping the urgent need for a review on the provision for special needs students. This amendment would stop the placement of excluded pupils in schools that are not equipped to deal with those students and stem the potentially harmful effect of that on the children themselves.
	We welcome the new amendments that the Minister has brought forward following the Education and Skills Committee's report. It is right to devote resources to continuing professional development. The mandatory training for new special educational needs co-ordinators—SENCOs—and the new requirement that they must be teachers represent a positive step in the right direction to ensure that the people dealing with pupils with special educational needs have adequate training. That is only right and, I am pleased to say, in accordance with the considered opinion of the Education and Skills Committee, in its recommendations 84 and 85.
	I hope also that a dyslexia trust to which local authorities and schools may bid for funding to support higher-level specialist teacher training will help those schools that need that extra support. I would be grateful, however, if the Minister could inform the House of the background to the establishment of such a trust, and the estimated costs.
	I hope that the Minister can take on board these suggestions as part of a much wider reassessment of special educational needs.

Lord Young of Norwood Green: My Lords, I have some sympathy with the views expressed by the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley, Lady Buscombe and Lady de Knayth, and the noble Lords, Lord Rix and Lord Dearing. I shall speak primarily to Amendment No. 81.
	I welcome the increased resources that the Government have given this issue but, as a primary school governor and a grandparent with a granddaughter who has been diagnosed as having Asperger's syndrome, I can attest to a significant variation in the quality of education delivered in mainstream schools. At my local primary school, the SENCO is well trained and is a part of the senior team, and governors receive regular reports on SEN provision.
	However, my granddaughter's experience has been mixed. Due to the influence of a very sympathetic head teacher, one small village primary school was a good example of inclusion in a mainstream school. At her current secondary school, the experience is not as positive. More training seems to be needed, and there needs to be an understanding that children with SEN have to adapt to a very different and challenging environment in a secondary school. They face a range of teachers where, in a private school, they had one who came to understand their needs well. There are increased homework demands, but there is a need to take into account the varied abilities of children with special educational needs. I hope the Minister takes into account that while we have put in more resources, we still have a problem with variation in the quality of provision. The points made on the Parent Partnership are valid.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, I love the thought of "Adonis days". No one knows better than the noble Lord, Lord Rix, how to pay a delightful compliment. I think they would go down very badly in schools where they would conjure up all the wrong images. At least "Baker days" conjured up a worthwhile profession, whereas I suspect that "Adonis days" would conjure up narcissism and a complete inability for the reality to live up to the ideal.
	Those in the Box have just passed me an excerpt from today's Times about the 3.20 at Ludlow this afternoon where a horse called "Lord Adonis" was running in a race called the Juvenile Novices Hurdle. I feel as though I have spent the whole afternoon running that race and I have a number of hurdles still to go. For any noble Lords who were hoping to make a quick buck, the price was 33-1, so I do not think they would have done very well.
	I start with the crucial role of special educational needs co-ordinators in schools, an issue to which we paid a great deal of attention following the report of the Select Committee on special educational needs. I shall speak to government Amendments Nos. 140, 144 and 153 which concern the crucial role of SENCOs.
	The central importance of the SENCO to good SEN provision was recognised by the Education and Skills Committee in its report on SEN. The committee recommended that SENCOs should, in all cases, be qualified teachers, in a senior management position in a school and it emphasised the importance of training for SENCOs. Government Amendments Nos. 140, 144 and 153 are introduced to implement that recommendation.
	In Amendment No. 82B, the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, seeks to ensure that the lead SENCO role will fall to a teacher. While government Amendment No. 140 refers to a SENCO as a "member of staff", I can give the House a categorical assurance that our intention, through regulations under the amendments I have moved, is to provide that the SENCO role should rest with a teacher. I also assure the House that the regulations will require SENCOs to be members of the senior leadership team in a school, as recommended by the committee.
	Under the regulation-making power that we are taking with these amendments, we will also institute more consistent standards for SENCOs supported by nationally accredited training, which will be a requirement for all newly appointed SENCOs to undertake after a date that we shall determine. As a first step towards that, we have commissioned the Training and Development Agency to develop a revised statement of the knowledge, skills and experience required of those leading special educational needs and disabilities provision in schools and a framework of standards for that role. This will help to inform our understanding about the level at which tasks should be performed and the type of nationally accredited training we will therefore provide. I believe that this will be a very major advance to the quality of training and support for special educational needs in schools.
	Although that represents a direction in respect of schools—we are very reluctant to direct schools—my own experience over the years has taught me that there is no more important role in a school, not only in the direct provision of special educational needs, but also in simulating a culture of support for SEN and training to fulfil obligations for SEN, than the role of the SEN co-ordinator. I therefore hope that the House will agree that this represents an effective response to the committee, and a significant step forward.
	On Amendment No. 81—also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley—on professional standards, we agree that it is important for all those who work closely with children to be properly equipped to deal with special educational needs and disability. The Secretary of State already has the power to set professional standards for teachers, and currently does so in secondary legislation and associated guidance. There is no need to set out specific standards in primary legislation, especially as doing so may reduce the flexibility needed to reflect developments over time.
	We take the issue of SEN and disability in professional standards seriously. The noble Baroness asked where we were on the current standards revision. A consultation on the revised standards for qualified teacher status has recently been completed and there are standards which relate to SEN and disability issues in the proposed revisions, which are more stringent than those they replace.
	Much depends on how these standards are put into practice. That is why, as part of our response to the Select Committee, we have asked Ofsted to carry out a thematic review of the journey the intending teacher takes through initial teacher training and induction in relation to SEN and disability. That is in addition to the work we are doing with the Teacher Training and Development Agency on a £1.1 million package of practical initiatives to strengthen the training teachers receive in SEN and disability. In our response to the Select Committee, we also announced that we are this year embarking on a national programme of continuing professional development for staff.
	Amendment No. 82 seeks to confer a duty on local authorities to secure a range of SEN provision. Section 14 of the Education Act 1996 relates to all schools, including special schools, and lays a duty on local authorities to secure sufficient schools for the provision of primary and secondary education. Section 14(6) says that, in exercising their functions to secure sufficient primary and secondary education, local authorities must have regard to the need for securing special educational provision for pupils with special educational needs. Those pupils include children with and without statements and with a variety of special educational needs, ranging from moderate to severe and complex. Local authorities must already, therefore, secure a range of provision.
	On the publication of information, my department collects information on the range of SEN provision in localities each year, and publishes information on the numbers of different types of the school and different pupils in each type of school in each local authority area. That is available on my department's website. In addition, the DfES annually publishes data for each authority, showing the number of children with statements of special educational needs and where they are placed. Data is also published on children with statements who are educated other than in school, and on those who are awaiting provision. This data is also available on the DfES website.
	Amendment No. 141 is in the name of the noble Lords, Lord Dearing and Lord Lucas, on the assessments and statements system. The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, is now setting himself up as one of a two-person think tank on a challenging issue which we recognise needs continued thought. I have given careful consideration to his amendment, which seeks to ensure that assessments are carried out without considerations of finance.
	The present arrangements require local authorities first and foremost to focus on carefully establishing a child's special educational needs so they can make appropriate provision to meet their individual needs. At the point of carrying out a statutory assessment, they must seek advice from the child's school, their educational psychologist, social services, health professionals and, of course, the child's parents. Advice is given independently and without consideration of finance. Indeed, paragraph 7.79 of the special educational needs code of practice, to which all local authorities must have regard by law, makes it clear that:
	"Those giving advice may comment on the amount of provision they consider appropriate. Thus LEAs should not have blanket policies that prevent those giving advice from commenting on the amount of provision they consider a child requires".
	If, having considered the assessment advice, the local authority decides to make a statement, it must specify appropriate provision for each identified need. As guardians of public funds, local authorities have duties not to incur unreasonable public expenditure and to use their resources efficiently in the context of meeting the identified needs of the child in question. This seems to be the right balance. It is difficult to see how the duties set out in the amendment could be reconciled with the duty of local authorities not to incur unreasonable public expenditure unless we were somehow able to provide unlimited resources.
	The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, is the last person to seek to encourage us to do things that are impractical and unattainable and subsections (2) and (3) of his new clause therefore seek to cover this point. The issue with those subsections is that by saying that a local authority may,
	"decide in the light of findings the extent of financial support to be provided",
	may simple reconstitute the current system in which the local authority has to decide how to meet the assessment within the resources it has available. It is not clear to me that the amendment is an improvement. Subsection (3) is genuinely ingenious and provides for cost-sharing between local and central government in respect of particularly high-cost placements. He specifies individual cases likely to exceed £50,000 or £100,000 a year. I can see some merit in that proposal, but our concern is that it might have the effect of encouraging local authorities to make perverse decisions in respect of placements that are not necessarily in the best interests of children because they would know that by making more expensive placements, they would be able to pass on a significant proportion of the costs to central government rather than having to meet them entirely through the decisions they make in respect of provision.
	The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, also tabled Amendment No. 142, which concerns parent partnership services. I am glad that he believes that they have an important role to play, and we agree with him. As to funding for parent partnership services, it is for elected local authorities to determine how best to deliver their statutory functions, including parent partnership services, within the overall funding available for school pupils from the department. However, in our response to the Select Committee, we made clear our intention to set clear expectations about how local authorities should meet the national standards for parent partnership services set out in the SEN code of practice, which include ensuring adequate funding. These expectations, which we will set out in due course, will include parent partnership services having their own budget, a management group with independent representation, links to children's information services and choice advisers, locating parent partnership services away from SEN casework teams, independent training for parent partnership service co-ordinators, access to independent parental support and a voice for parent partnership services in local children's services policy development. Those requirements being set out more clearly will help the more effective development of parent partnership services, but I take to heart the point the noble Lord made about ensuring earlier notification to parents of the availability of the parent partnership service—and I will see if there is more we can do in that regard—so that parents are aware of the availability of the service from the point at which they need to start engaging with the system regarding the special educational needs of their children.
	Amendments Nos. 115A and 116A were moved by my noble friend Lady Thornton and relate to discrimination against disabled pupils. We accept the principles that underlie them, but we believe that they are met by existing law and guidance. In making their statement of principles and determining the measures that constitute a school's behaviour policy, governing bodies and head teachers must act in accordance with their statutory responsibilities towards pupils with disabilities. In addition, Clause 87 makes it clear that a disciplinary penalty is a penalty imposed on a pupil where his behaviour falls below a standard that could reasonably be expected of that individual; that is, behaviour that could reasonably be expected of the pupil taking into account any disability that he or she may have. Clause 88 specifies that, in order to be lawful, a disciplinary penalty must satisfy three conditions, one of which—the condition of reasonableness—is determined by taking into account the pupil's disability.
	The same arguments apply to subsection (1) of Amendment No. 117 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe. In determining a school's behaviour policy, head teachers must act in accordance with their statutory responsibilities toward pupils with special educational needs. The safeguards in Clauses 87 and 88 apply to special educational needs in the same way as to disability.
	We will be reinforcing these messages and providing practical advice on how to provide for such pupils in our guidance on school behaviour policies. In doing so, we will consult with the Special Educational Consortium and other key stakeholders about its contents.
	Subsections (2) and (3) in Amendment No. 117 concern physical restraint. I stress that Clause 90, which deals with the use of force, is not new. It re-enacts provisions that became law eight years ago, and we are not aware of any problems caused by them since. That is not to say that there have not been cases where pupils, parents and school staff have been unhappy about when and how physical restraint has been used. Given the emotive nature of the issue, there are bound to be such cases. The actual guidance and law have not been felt to be inadequate.
	The department has supported the provision with guidance, including specific guidance relating to pupils with special educational needs. We will be reviewing our guidance in the light of the parliamentary debates and will consult a wide range of stakeholders as we do so.
	I turn to Amendment No. 117A regarding exclusions in the name of my noble friend Lady Thornton, which was spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Darcy. This amendment would ensure that no disabled pupil or pupil with special educational needs could be excluded permanently unless a review was held, either of the reasonable adjustments being made for a disabled pupil or of the special educational provision being made for a pupil with special educational needs.
	My noble friend asked me about the robustness of our protections for such pupils. I entirely agree that we need protections which are as robust as we can make them, balancing of course the duties that schools also have for the welfare of other pupils. The recently issued guidance on exclusions from schools with pupil referral units, which the department has given out, could not be more robust in this respect. Paragraph 45 on pupils with special educational needs states:
	"Statutory guidance on identifying, assessing and making provision for pupils with SEN, including those with behavioural, social and emotional needs, is given in the Special Educational Needs Code of Practice. Schools must have regard to this guidance. School governing bodies"—
	a matter also mentioned by my noble friend—
	"have a statutory duty to do their best to ensure that the necessary provision is made for any pupil who has SEN. Early identification and intervention, accurate assessment and the arrangement of appropriate provision to meet pupils' SEN usually leads to better outcomes".
	On exclusions paragraph 46 of the guidance states:
	"Other than in the most exceptional circumstances, schools should avoid excluding pupils with statements. They should also make every effort to avoid excluding pupils who are being supported at School Action or School Action Plus under the Special Educational Needs Code of Practice, including those at School Action Plus who are being assessed for a statement".
	I believe that the guidance on this issue being given to schools could not be clearer. More progress needs to be made on the actual practice in schools itself but that is improving.
	The statistics on the exclusion of pupils with special educational needs shows a substantial drop. The number of permanent exclusions of pupils with statements of SEN dropped from 2,250 in 1997 to 1,130 in 2002. It is now down to 850 for the last year for which we have statistics, which is 2004-05. I think that the House will accept that a reduction from 2,250 to 850 represents great progress by schools, although of course there is further to go.
	A recent in-depth study by the National Foundation for Educational Research into an admissions and exclusions of pupils with special educational needs published in January last year—I will make this research more widely available to noble Lords—concluded:
	"Pupils with SEN generally went through the same processes as, and were treated similarly to, other pupils, but thresholds were often higher and a greater degree of unacceptable behaviour was tolerated before the exclusion process was initiated".
	That indicates that the reasonable adjustments that my noble friend rightly seeks and which schools are expected to observe under the Disability Discrimination Act are already being observed by the great majority of schools, as the research stated. However, we accept that more progress needs to be made. That is why, under the Disability Discrimination Act, from this December all schools will have to publish disability equality plans, which will take the implementation of their obligations to a new level.
	I therefore hope that my noble friend will be satisfied that we are very much on the case. She asked me a number of specific questions, which I think were put to her by the Special Education Consortium. I have long replies to each of the points that she raised; it may be best if I circulate those to noble Lords in writing. I hope that that will persuade my noble friend to decide that she does not need to bring the matter back at Third Reading.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, it is shorthand for both; I could have referred to voluntary aided and voluntary controlled schools. I do mean both types of school and those are what the amendments capture.
	Amendments Nos. 83, 84 and 85 were spoken to by the noble Baronesses, Lady Williams and Lady Sharp. They relate to non-maintained schools, particularly academies. They asked me in the first place how they will be accountable for failure, and in the second place how they will make a proper contribution to pupil well-being and the Every Child Matters outcomes. In terms of failure, I think there is a straightforward misunderstanding here. The powers held by the Secretary of State in respect of academies track very closely the statutory intervention powers which local authorities have over maintained schools, including the enhanced powers set out in the Bill. The Secretary of State has a range of intervention powers in respect of academies which he holds by virtue of an academy trust's articles of association and funding agreements. The Secretary of State is enabled by these means to appoint additional governors, to stop funding the academy or to close it outright. These powers are in every respect as extensive as those a local authority is able to exercise under the regime set out in the Bill. As I say, they track closely the regime we are seeking to put in place in relation to maintained schools.
	I accept entirely what the noble Baroness has said. She is right to say that no category of school is immune to failure. We see that failure can afflict schools in any category and I accept that that includes academies. Indeed, because academies are succeeding some of the most challenging schools in the country, they face particular challenges and are liable to fail. I have never in any way disguised that fact. But I believe that our bona fides in this respect can be seen to be quite clear. For example, the Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough was put into a category of failure by Ofsted. My department took immediate action of a kind which we would expect a local authority to take when exercising its powers under this Bill. We engaged in a dialogue with the sponsor that led to very swift and radical changes to the governing body of the academy very quickly after the inspection report and made within a timescale which we would expect local authorities to observe. There was also a substantial change to the leadership of that school, a decision taken by the reconstituted governing body in close consultation with the departments. I am glad to say that this year the results of that academy rose significantly in both the key stage 3 and GCSE categories.
	I do not seek to suggest that there are different rules or different regimes. There is a great difference in the relationship between the state and academies—and, indeed, other categories of more autonomous schools—and the relationship between local school boards and charter schools in the United States. I accept that they have a much greater degree of autonomy. In some cases—because each individual state in the US has different chartering arrangements—it is very difficult for a state to intervene short of pulling the rug out and withdrawing funding to make it impossible for the school to proceed. In our system, the full accountability regime applies to all categories of schools. We discussed earlier the school improvement partners, which are appointed in respect of academies and other categories of school, and their accountability for results, the publication of performance data and inspection by Ofsted.
	As regards pupil well-being and Every Child Matters, we have mechanisms in place to uphold schools' accountability for contributing to Every Child Matters outcomes, irrespective of the category of the school. We have the new Ofsted inspection regime, school self-evaluation and the role of school improvement partners, all of which apply equally to non-maintained as well as to maintained schools. In respect specifically of academies, they are obliged to contribute to the five Every Child Matters outcomes in a variety of ways. First, through their funding agreements, which make them responsible for being at the heart of their community, sharing facilities with other schools and the wider community. Secondly, it is an expectation that each academy will work closely with its local authority to ensure that the needs of each child are met and that the directors of children's services are able to carry out the duties and accountabilities placed on them for every child educated within their local area, regardless of whether the child attends a state or independent school. Thirdly, academies will be required to participate in their local children and young people's plans and to have regard to them. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State gave an undertaking in another place that we would amend the articles of association and funding agreements of academies to ensure that they are obliged to have regard to children and young people's plans. We have already indicated to the academies that we intend to make those changes in their funding agreements.

Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, my noble friend Lady Sharp has asked me to apologise for forgetting to thank the Minister for the government amendments in that last group which resulted from points that we made in Committee. We are most grateful to the Government for that.
	I should like to say a word about Amendments Nos. 93 and 94, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe. It is perhaps unfortunate that my amendment comes first; we are all very grateful to the noble Baroness for raising the important question of the role of modern foreign languages in today's school curriculum. It might have been more desirable if she could have spoken first, but that's the way the cookie crumbles in your Lordships' House.
	Like the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, who recently set up a new all-party group on scientific research in education and learning to which I am very much looking forward, I believe we should base our education policies on high quality evidence of how children learn best. Not only that, we need to take into account when they learn best. With languages, there is a mountain of evidence that they learn best at an early age. My grandchildren learnt Chinese as they were learning to talk, at the same time that they learnt English. It was amazing to me to hear them chattering away to each other in Chinese as they played. If we want to do something about the terrible reputation we British have for languages, we need to start early. That is what Amendment No. 91 would achieve.
	I am aware that the Government have introduced a number of initiatives in primary schools; no doubt the Minister will tell us about some of them when he responds. I am also aware that there is a lot of good practice out there and many schools have been very creative in the way in which they have addressed the matter. One multicultural school I heard about has a language of the week, when a few children get to share their mother tongue with the rest of the school, including the teachers, for at least a few days in the year—and there are even more languages in that school than there are weeks in the year. That sort of thing helps children to get the idea that there is more than one way in which to express things.
	Only the other day, one of my husband's little grandchildren looked at the television and said, "Mummy, there's a mochyn". His mother, who speaks only English, was a bit puzzled until she realised that in Wales they teach Welsh to three year-olds, and Finlay was referring to the pig on the television—which in Welsh, I gather, is a mochyn.
	I know that there might be an objection to my amendment relating to the availability of the appropriate work force to carry out what I am seeking to do—to ensure that all children have some experience of a modern foreign language from the very first key stage. I would encourage the Government to take steps to train qualified teachers to specialise in teaching languages to very young children. But in the mean time I see no reason why teaching materials cannot be developed by qualified people for use by ordinary primary teachers.
	I say "ordinary", but I think that most primary teachers are extraordinary in the way in which they manage to get their heads around so many subjects and make them interesting and exciting for the children. They already wear a lot of hats, so one more may not be such an imposition, especially if they are working with good quality materials. Besides, I think that most teachers realise that as they are preparing children to grow up in quite a different world from the one in which I grew up, when air travel and mass emigration has made the world a much smaller place, it is essential that we get them learning languages at the best possible moment—that is, early. In addition, I would like to see schools using native speakers of other languages from the community and bringing them into primary schools. The foreign teaching assistants who work in secondary schools might also be able to contribute something. We need to be a bit imaginative and a bit flexible—and I hope that the NUT will agree with me.
	On the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, I am afraid that despite the fact that I am grateful to her for raising the subject I do not support her Amendment No. 93, which would make a modern foreign language compulsory at key stage 4. With the first public examinations, you need to give young people as much choice as possible and not be too prescriptive, apart from the core subjects. But the noble Baroness has kindly listened to an objection that I made when we first considered this matter—that for some children it would be better to spend the time on more English lessons. That is what her Amendment No. 94 seeks to address in part. But the provision applies to two groups: the first is those for whom English is not their mother tongue, which is the group she addresses in Amendment No. 94. The other group is of those children for whom, although English is their mother tongue, they have some difficulty with it and need extra help. The Government have rightly identified that literacy is the most basic tool and opens the door to all sorts of other learning so is the right and proper focus of many initiatives, but the noble Baroness's Amendment No. 94 does not take those children into account. For them, it would not be appropriate to enforce a course of study of a foreign language up to public examination stage.
	Before I move, I pass on to your Lordships a lovely phrase that I heard only this morning from my noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno. He told me that when he was in Jerusalem recently a young Arab boy said to him, "When I have one language it opens one window on the world; when I have two languages, it opens two windows on the world". I leave your Lordships with that thought and I beg to move.

Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, I shall use a foreign language to say, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose". I cannot forget that years ago when I was Secretary of State for Education we endeavoured to bring in French to schools for children at the age of eight, with the suggestion that there should be a second foreign language at the age of 12 when children had gone into the upper school. We started a special language teachers' college, and we tried to encourage people to go in and to learn other languages. There was a big upsurge, as the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, will find out, in the study particularly of Russian at that time, followed quite closely by Spanish. There was quite a widespread fashion in schools to learn Russian because of the significance of Russia in the 1970s and 1980s, and Spanish became a more popular subject. I do not quite know why so much of that initiative has withered on the vine. It may have been partly the outcome of financial reductions proportionately in educational spending.
	I completely agree with the noble Baronesses, Lady Buscombe and Lady Howe, that this is a disaster. A country such as ours, if it expects to go on being successful, even in the most direct economic terms, cannot expect to be taken terribly seriously, or to get contracts, or to win service contracts in particular if it is completely unable to speak any language but its own. It is not very easy to conduct diplomacy entirely in one's own language; it makes one very unpopular with foreign powers. But it is much more than that; it is about a kind of narrowing of the whole sense of the world's culture and it is an inability to know any of the literature of other countries in a world that is becoming increasingly interdependent. It means that Britain in many ways is impoverished by the simple incapacity to speak anyone else's language. It is not only about language, but about thinking in the way that other people think.
	I remember years ago, when I was teaching in Africa, hearing one French African say to another, "Voila l'esprit Cartésien". That was is the middle of a desert in Senegal. I could not help thinking that there was something quite staggering about French culture when all those miles away from metropolitan France people can talk about l'esprit Cartésien. That tells you something about other cultures, other languages and other countries and the contribution that they can make to the world's civilisation.
	So I strongly support the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, in her amendments, and I am certain that the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, will listen very carefully because I am sure that his heart is already with the debate.

Lord Lucas: My Lords, one trouble with the French is that they cannot admit that Descartes was wrong. I entirely support the spirit of my noble friend's amendment. It seems enormously important that we should get ourselves to a position where we find foreign languages easy, as many other European nations do. The learning of languages is clearly not inherent to us in a genetic sense; it is something that we have allowed to develop as a cultural artefact.
	Having been top dogs for a long time, we do not realise that we cannot now "boss it around" in the way that we used to. Although we have the great privilege of English being the international business language, it will clearly be under threat from Chinese. The Chinese are determined to make their language the business language of the East and they are putting a lot of money into that. I am delighted that we are responding through the British Council to keep English in there.
	One way and another, we are going to find ourselves in a world where we need to speak foreign languages and, in any case, doing so is a matter of courtesy. If you are dealing seriously with people from another country, it is clear that you, one of your colleagues or someone in the business must understand them, their culture and their language. This should be, as it is in so many other European countries, something that we generate ourselves.
	As the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, said, language learning has to start at the earliest stages, when it is easy. I have the habit of buying DVDs on eBay and, from time to time, I end up with some fairly strange products. So, when I have not quite read what it is I am buying, my daughter watches "Shrek" in Cantonese and various other things in French and Mandarin. But she absorbs and enjoys them, and one picks up the occasional foreign word in her conversation—it seems to be a natural facility at that age.
	As my noble friend Lady Buscombe said, there are many good products out there at the moment. There are self-education courses aimed at almost every level. It does not require teachers to know the language; they can learn it along with the pupils. Indeed, having an inexperienced teacher helps you to learn to use the product and to get over problems. We could set out on a journey together in Russian, my teacher and I, and I do not need her to start with a word of it. So long as she understands how the process works, we can follow the same course together and help each other to get over the hurdles. That can happen at any age.
	We do not need a great cohort of people speaking whatever language in primary schools. What are we going to dictate to primary schools that they should do? We need only give them the facilities and the encouragement so that they can pick up on a lot of material that is out there and explore languages with their pupils. They can give those pupils a facility and make it seem easy to them. They can make it seem that languages are not the enormous hurdle that they have come to be seen to be—the hard discipline or the GCSE that is hardest to get through. Languages should trip easily off the tongue.
	I am absolutely delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, has been given the job that he has. It means that we have two people to speak to this evening: the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, and the Minister—and I hope that we can convince at least one of them.
	I hope that the noble Lord will take an interest in the music examination system, which, it seems to me, has always had a great deal of application in languages. It should be taken in small steps. The split between playing and theory also seems to fit very well with languages. You can have just the speaking—the enjoyment—of the language to a certain level and allow the theory to lag behind but then catch up later. That is certainly how people get caught into the system of music exams. They may well reach grade 5 without knowing much theory but then realise that they have to catch up. But, by that stage, they are already on the ladder and—whoosh—the theory comes on from behind. On the other hand, the two peg together so that, by the time you are getting anywhere serious, you are level-pegging on theory and on the enjoyment side.
	There is a lot of hope if only we can realise what it out there, how easy it is to learn languages and how much can be done without enormous expenditure or training and without a great deal of dislocation. One thing we must do is ensure that we motivate schools to teach languages. At the moment one can drop languages, take up media studies or whatever and there is no difference at all; there are the same results and the same motivation. We have to make it clear that languages are to be valued and that they must be reported on separately so that schools can focus on them. Let them use their ingenuity and the facilities with which we provide them to decide how, with their pupils, they will make progress in languages.
	There is a great deal of expertise and understanding out there about how to teach pupils. Let it go. Let us not have the problem we had a few years ago when a wonderful course called "business studies in Spanish" was pioneered by Millais School, a state comprehensive in Horsham. It was killed by the QCA, which said, "We're not having this; it is far too expensive; it is not standard; we will charge you £50,000 a year to ensure it is up to standard", and so it died. That is entirely the wrong attitude. We have to let lots of people try lots of different ways of motivating pupils who come from a background where there is no incentive to learn languages. We want them to pick up languages and enjoy them. Given that kind of spirit, we will get somewhere.

Lord Dearing: My Lords, perhaps I may reflect for a moment. In 1993, I was withdrawn from the world of higher education, where I was devising a new funding methodology, to do a lightning review of the national curriculum. By comparison, university was a kindergarten. I had never been so terrified in my life as during the three months I was given to review the national curriculum because there was such passion and conviction, but it was all over the place. Macbeth says:
	"that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return, To plague the inventor".Earlier this afternoon, I was saying that local authorities should be accountable for their decisions. I look around this House and think "I am going to produce a report, and will be accountable to this House. I cannot escape!". Perhaps I should take special leave after Christmas.
	Somewhere in the "Good Book", it says:
	"To everything there is a season ... a time to be born, and a time to die".
	Dearing, this is the time to listen and shut up. I will say things, however, from time to time, because it draws fire, excites interest and I learn.
	A couple of things. First, I had a letter from a head teacher in a special school which said some good and sensible things, but she felt that this review was not really for special schools. I e-mailed her to say, "Yes, the review concerns all schools". Secondly, several references have been made to the ladder. Without having studied it, I see it as something that must command my attention, partly because of the small steps and the motivation and recognition that come from it and partly because, between steps, there are smaller steps recessed within the school rather than externally—the individual rungs are external. It could be a means of getting that articulation between primary—where everybody is saying we should start—and secondary without the dislocation that so often happens. I say that with some anxiety but, since it has been urged upon me, I shall look into it.
	I am vastly intrigued by the dance mat. I have received in the post "Flirt Spanish", and wonder if we could trade. I have not yet assessed it for its relevance and value.
	I feel privileged as well as terrified to undertake this review, and do so with the recognition of how important it is to make progress in this area. I recall the German ambassador once saying something like, "If you come to my country to buy something, speaking English, OK. But if you come to sell something, it helps to speak a bit of German". I think we all gain from speaking a bit of German.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, anyone who has followed education policy over the past 15 years, under both parties, will know that whenever a particularly intractable problem presents itself, one not subject to the powers of mere mortals to overcome, the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, is sent for. By an inscrutable process which usually takes several months—he acts very fast—he produces a deus ex machina: the answer to all our problems and an effective way forward. If he was able to do it with student finance—about the most intractable issue it is possible to imagine—he may find languages a relatively easy problem to crack.
	On behalf of the whole House, I say how grateful we are to the noble Lord for taking on this responsibility. In my experience, there is no challenge that he does not rise to splendidly. The country owes him many debts of gratitude for the public services he has performed over the years, and this will be not the least of them.
	A heavy burden rests on him, because there is a great sense of public unease—I shall be frank—reflected in the debate this evening about the teaching of languages in secondary schools. The noble Baroness is quite right to highlight the issue in her amendment. We have grappled with it and have not found the last word on policy in any respect, and have passed the baton to the noble Lord to find a better way forward for us.
	Under the terms of reference, which my right honourable friend has agreed with the noble Lord, he will examine the scope for action to further strengthen incentives for schools and young people to continue with languages after 14. He will look at how we can support secondary schools in making a wider range of more flexible language courses available, with accreditation so that more young people keep up language learning—if not all the way through to GSCE, certainly to the later years of secondary education. He will work with representatives of further and higher education to see what might be done to widen access to, and increase interest in, language learning among students. He will also consult employer organisations, other organisations and pupils to see what ideas they have for taking forward policy in this area.
	The noble Lords, Lord Quirk and Lord Lucas, mentioned the languages ladder. It closely reflects music grades and was designed with the philosophy of music grades in mind. Students can demonstrate their competence in languages in small stages and progress without having to make the giant leap to GCSE that was previously required. I am delighted to say that I am about to present the 10,000th award under the languages ladder scheme, and that must be a sign that it has reasonably wide take-up, which is a welcome development. I am delighted that the noble Lords highlighted the languages ladder for examination of how its wider use in schools could be encouraged to ensure that teaching and learning languages do not suffer the rapid fall-off that they currently experience in secondary years.
	In respect of Amendment No. 91, which was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, I am glad to say that the position in primary education is rather better. When we introduced the new policy on languages, which included making them optional at key stage 4, our philosophy was that we needed to do much more to make a reality of what the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, was seeking to do back in the 1970s; namely, the systematic introduction of languages in primary schools. In order to carry through that policy, we not only established a new national entitlement that will take effect in due course, but we also provided significant support for languages teaching in primary schools, including a new PGCE for languages in primary schools—formerly, there was no dedicated PGCE for teaching languages in primary schools—and providing financial support to allow schools to introduce languages. Since that policy began in 2002, more than 2,000 primary teachers with a languages specialism have been trained, and in the financial year 2006-07 and until the end of this decade, a further 1,000 primary school languages teachers will be trained each year. By the end of the next financial year, we will have invested more than £60 million to build capacity at primary level.
	There is evidence that this is having an effect. In December 2002, only one in five primary schools was offering language learning opportunities, most of that was extracurricular and there were no trained primary teachers specialising in languages. Now, according to the latest survey, 56 per cent of primary schools are delivering or planning to deliver languages learning programmes, so significant improvement has taken place in primary schools. However, I accept that there is a great deal further to go. We need to look not only at training additional languages teachers for primary schools, but also at how languages can play a role in the development of extended schools at primary level and at how we can further encourage supplementary schools, which can have a significant languages component, which we are also seeking to do. We also need to look at how we can further embed the languages ladder so that primary school pupils not only start to learn a language, but take the stages of the ladder seriously to improve their competence year on year. If we can crack that, we will have made a substantial contribution to ensuring that pupils in secondary education are motivated to learn languages. In languages, as in all other subjects, motivation is the key. If students arrive at secondary school motivated to learn languages by already having made progress and possessing steps on the languages ladder, then half our job will have been achieved.

Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate. I thank noble Lords who took part in it and the Minister for his reply. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, said at the beginning of her contribution that modern foreign languages are in freefall. I share her concern. We differ on what to do about it. We feel that if we started teaching modern foreign languages earlier more young people would want to take them up to external exam level and go on to university; so we would not need to compel them.
	The old saying is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Clearly it is broke and I close by saying that I hope the noble Lord will fix it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
	House adjourned at half past six o'clock.